Enjoyable Reading

I don't remember learning how to read. As the youngest of four children of parents who were both readers, I don't doubt that someone was always reading to me or showing me a book. I do know, through family lore not personal remembrance, that I was reading the New York Times before we sailed to Germany when I was between two and three. My mother used to show me off like a trained seal and especially if she thought she was getting one up on her own sisters who were all older than she, so she told her sisters that I could read the NYT and then had me prove it. We all grew up with our noses in books including the encyclopedia.

I still read, usually two to three books a week plus multiple newspapers every day online. My husband was not much of a reader until relatively recently, but now reads every day and enjoys commenting on the books and authors. His turnaround occurred primarily because of my work with the high school students. It's often a frustrating task, one that pretty much requires talking it out with someone. Since my husband is a good listener, he is my sounding board and talking about characterization and point of view, dialogue and setting, et cetera, got him to think about literature in a way that no element of his education had previously. He is pretty typical of many very smart men. Reading was what you did to pass the exam. That seems to be an even bigger group now including many young women I meet. Sometimes I ask these young women how they intend to pass their time when they are my age since it seems unlikely if not impossible that they will still be playing computer games. The future does look to be largely devoid of reading as I understand the activity.

Anyway, I am reading Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs right now. Sometimes I like certain authors because they describe people and situations that are quite foreign to me or to my experiences. Russo's work often embodies the opposite concept. His settings and his characters are like blasts from my past. Even though I was only about ten when we moved from western Pennsylvania, the neighborhoods and attitudes in this book, though it is set in upstate New York, mirror what I remember and in some ways also mirror what we experienced in Cleveland when we lived there after my husband finished graduate school. Of course Russo is describing pretty much the same time period in which I grew up so it has that familiarity as well.  Good writing, good reading.