Story for the Week
Reading is Fundamental. When I was a kid, that was a constant PSA on television. I didn’t know then that it was an organization that promotes literacy. I just knew that I wholeheartedly believed (and still believe) that reading IS fundamental.
I also remember looking forward to the Scholastic catalogs. Another organization that promotes literacy, Scholastic provides affordable books to school-age children through book fairs and book clubs. I always had to select wisely. We were a one-income family, like most families in those days, and we didn’t have a lot of space since I had to share a room with my sister.
So as I’ve described in other posts, we spent a lot of time at the library because those books were free. I buried myself in The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys. I was obviously a fan of mysteries back then. While my preferences may have expanded, my love of reading has never wavered.
When our daughter was born, my husband and I made a point of reading to her. A friend of mine sent us books as a gift after she was born: Good Night, Gorilla and But Not the Hippopotamus. We would spend almost every evening saying good night to all the animals in the zoo and lamenting all of the things the hippopotamus was not invited to do. She couldn’t read the words then, but she knew when to say, “But NOT the hippopotamus.” She also enjoyed Pat the Bunny—smelling the flowers, feeling Daddy’s scratchy face (a piece of sandpaper), playing peek-a-boo.
As she got older, she would ask for books for birthdays and Christmas. One year, her Aunt Cindi and Uncle Tom gave her The Big Blue Book of Beginner Books, a compilation of six children’s titles. For months, Uncle Tom kept saying he thought it was an awful gift (Uncle Tom is not a reader), and I told him over and over that it was the perfect gift because she took that book everywhere. Soon she added The Big Green Book of Beginner Books and The Big Red Book of Beginner Books to her collection. We’ve gone through her book collection a few times over the years, donating books to the library as she outgrows them, but these books are ones that she has never had the heart to part with. That’s a feeling that Mommy can sympathize with. 😉
Once she started school, she started borrowing books from the school library. That was when we decided it was time to get her a library card of her own. It had been a lot of years since I needed a library card. (I had turned into a book buyer as opposed to a book borrower.) My husband and I got library cards that day too, and I asked our daughter to pick out a book for me. When she walked over with a hardcover Anne Rice novel, I asked my husband for a Kindle for my birthday. I was still commuting into the office at that point (I work from home now), and I knew I wasn’t going to love carrying those hardcovers in my bag to read on the train. Once I went to a Kindle, I never went back. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the look and feel (and yes, the smell) of a new book, but I can’t beat the convenience of the Kindle.
As our daughter got older, I started taking her to the library like my mother took us. She was hooked on the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, Judy Moody, Goosebumps, and (God help me) Captain Underpants and Bad Kitty. And she also looked forward to the Scholastic book fairs at school. We always sent her with money so she could buy what she wanted, but she knew that where her father is a pushover about toys, her mother is a pushover when it comes to buying books.
I tried to volunteer at as many book fairs as I could, and we always donated a book to her classroom. The fairs usually lasted three days, and each class had a time slot at least two of the days. I distinctly remember one of them when the time I had available to volunteer was the second day. On the first day, our daughter bought books and a couple posters and some tchotchkes with the cash we gave her. I told her that if there was anything that she wanted but didn’t have enough money for that she could buy it the next day when I was there.
Her class went to the book fair before my volunteer slot on the second day, and I got a text from one of the other parents who was volunteering. He told me to remember to bring my checkbook because our daughter had walked up to the register with a stack of books and said confidently, “My mom will pay for these when she gets here.” And I did, because I’m a pushover when it comes to buying books.
There was another book fair when she went through the flyer ahead of time, and she was insistent that she wanted to buy a six-book set of Diary of a Minecraft Zombie (there are 18 books now). I was hesitant because it seemed a little too “young” for her, so I told her that we would buy the Minecraft Zombie books IF she also purchased the first set in the series of Wings of Fire, not because I had read them or heard of them. I just thought they sounded interesting and that she might just like them.
We never did buy the Minecraft Zombie books because we discovered they were definitely too young for her when we got a chance to see them, but we are still buying the Wings of Fire books six years later. 🐉 When I told her the subject of this blog post and specifically mentioned this story, she said, “I LOVE those books! They’re so good!”
She might not be as obsessed with reading as I am, and she certainly doesn’t read as quickly as I do. She will never have a blog about reading, but she might have a vlog about something (she IS Gen Z). She prefers the physical books to e-books, and sometimes I have to prompt her to pick up a book when she tells me she’s bored, but she reads. And having been raised by a reader myself, I have the joy of having raised a reader of my own.
Reading IS fundamental. 📚
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