Sixteenth Blog: What I thought I knew about reading

What I thought I knew: When I was a child, my mother read to me every night. She read to me, I think through early junior high. We went to the library every two weeks and got to check out our own books. I have some of the books my mom read to me, and most of them are books of poetry. Robert Louis Stevenson is a favorite of mine: "How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so high?" or "In winter I get up at night and go to bed by candlelight; in summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day." My mother read AA Milne's "Winnie the Pooh" and CS Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and Dicken's "David Copperfield" and all three of "The Lord of the Ring." She also read me my first mystery, "The Moonstone." We read Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" prior to seeing the play when we still lived in the San Fernando Valley and were going to the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego.

I loved to read. I read constantly. I read novels aimed at teenagers including all of the Narnia books several times over. I read Jessamyn West's "Cress Delehanty," all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder novels that started with "Little House in the Big Woods" and "On the Banks of Plum Creek." As an adult, I hated the TV version of her books: "Little House on the Prairie." I read my father's Playboy magazines and "Fannie Hill." He hid those unsuccessfully under the couch. I've read all of the Agatha Christie mysteries over and over. I read all of the Mad Magazine books I could borrow and every "BC" and "The Wizard of Id" comic I could find. I have purchased many of those from used bookstores as an adult. I will stop here as there is a thunder storm.

Continuing later in the month, I remind myself that I love to read by checking my bag of library books. Whew! I still have a few more books. I also read many James Thurber stories and his weird sense of humor makes me feel less a freak. During my late high school years, I soaked up Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow and I despised F. Scott Fitzgerald. Symbolism be dammed. I like a story that is about what people do and think. I also read essays by Montaigne, which I find impossible to read now, but thoroughly enjoyed then. I hated Faulkner - a long days journey into ennui, but wrote a paper for my AP English class about "The Simple Hemingway Style." Damn, I'm good. 

Sometime in high school, I started reading the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout. My husband joined me in my enjoyment of Nero Wolfe, and we gathered any used books we could find at the Seattle Goodwill. I still have most of the Nero Wolfe collection by the Viking Press and some paperbacks. I read the Anne McCaffrey "dragons of Pern" series but quit when she acquired a co-author. Then my father introduced me to Tony Hillerman - mysteries at Four Corners taking place mostly on the Navajo reservation. I'll have a devil of a time without his books now that he has died. During the 1980s, I enjoyed the humor of "The Far Side", "Herman", "Doonesbury" and "Calvin & Hobbes" and I have collected many of those comics. I read some of the Dune books, all of the Ray Bradbury science fiction and I loved the Foundation Trilogy by Issac Asimov.

After my divorce, I found Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series that start with "One For the Money," and so on to her recent 17th book. Stephanie Plum has a dangerous job as a bounty hunter that she is ill prepared for and the romance of a homicide detective. Plus, she likes to shop for shoes at Macy's. Speaking of shopping, I really enjoyed the "shopaholic" stories by Sophie Kinsella, and I can finish one in a night (but they are like candy: you can overdo it and feel sick to your stomach). In graduate school, I of course read all the assigned reading. What a nerd! I got very good a reading journal articles and skimming right by the insistent and repeated lists of authors who were quoted.  If the article was about research, I would read the beginning statement about what the author(s) expected to accomplish and then skip to the "results" section.

Meanwhile, I enjoyed the Nevada Barr mysteries, featuring Anna Pigeon as she works for the Forest Service in different National Parks. I think she should set one of her books in the black vastness of Idaho's Craters of the Moon, but it might be too small to hire Anna Pigeon. I read Robert Parker mysteries: you may have seen the Jesse Stone series on television starring Tom Selleck. I have whipped through the Temperance Brennan books by Kathy Reichs and other series by other mystery authors. I have read crap and waded through it because I was bored and read great stuff that kept me reading till I was done with the book. I have read things that after two pages were obscure or in a setting that is not modern (I like modern) and dumped them back in my library bag; I have a great shopping bag from Trader Joe's.

What I have learned: My tolerance for heavy reading has diminished. I need relief, not something to think about. When necessary, I peruse through work related texts and workbooks for counseling tools. The only magazines I've read in the last ten years are about motocross or Oprah's magazine. I don't take the newspaper and I turned off my cable TV. So, I read every night before I go to sleep as I have my whole lifetime. I have plans to read the Bible; you'd think a preacher's daughter would already have finished that book. I sometimes re-read books by Irvin Yalom, an existential therapist of some note who writes in an engaging and interesting manner about counseling. I re-read the "Lord of the Ring" books sometime after the movies started to appear and when I've read everything in the library bag, I re-read Rex Stout, or any other paperback from my collection. Shelf room being finite, I only keep a few authors around, along with books about painters or photographers. I've tossed most of my under-graduate text books.

My family also reads like me, so when visiting any one of them, I know there will be good reading material. I take books on trips and camping, and I include guides to the stars, birds, trees, flowers and wildlife. Am I not my father's daughter or what? Thanks for reading to me mom!