Portrait of a Young Reader
A few of the many books I enjoyed as a young reader.
Once again, I’d like to thank my friend Courtney for inspiring this blog post. She recently watched the second episode of One for the Books, in which I interview middle grade author Mariama J. Lockington, and it inspired her to reflect on what kind of reader she was as a kid. So coming full circle, I want to do the same.
I can’t possibly talk about what kind of young reader I was without thanking my parents for encouraging my love of reading. My dad isn’t much of a reader (he reads news and magazines, but not so much books), but he still backed my mom up and helped set the message that reading was important. He also worked his butt off so that mom could stay home with us as young kids, and do things like read to us, and take us to the library. My mom is an avid reader, so my brother and I had that behavior modeled for us, and we both turned into book lovers ourselves.
Perhaps the most crucial parenting tactic that created our love of books was our bedtime policy. As young kids, my brother and I had a bedtime at 9pm. BUT if we were pajama’d up with teeth brushed and in bed by 9pm, we could read until 9:30. It was a super sneaky way of making us get ready for bed on time and making us feel super special, like we were staying up “late”. There were no exceptions to the rule. We couldn’t stay up playing video games or running around outside or watching TV or playing with toys in our room. In bed, with a book was the only way the 9:30 bedtime applied. If we took too long getting ready and weren’t in bed until 9:15pm, we only got 15 minutes to read, and felt cheated. It was wildly effective. As we grew older and our bedtime became later, the same policy applied. 9:30 bedtime, but you can stay up until 10pm if you’re reading. 10pm bedtime, but you can stay up until 10:30pm if you’re reading, and so on.
I still remember the distinctive “click” of the lamp that was clamped to the headboard of my bed. It seemed so loud when I tried to turn it on to read later than I was supposed to, or turn it off well after I was supposed to be asleep. I’m sure my parents were well aware of us staying up too late to keep reading, but I only remember them coming around to tell us to “stop reading and go to sleep” a handful of times. They were probably secretly high-fiving that their strategy worked so well. When I have kids of my own, I fully intend to deploy this tactic.
I remember all the libraries of my childhood distinctly. Up through the 3rd grade, we lived in New Albany, Indiana. The public library there was downtown, and was a dull brutalist concrete building with a large, (somewhat disturbing, as a child) bronze statue out front that looked like a bunch of people melting together. I remember the desk where we’d sign in for the summer reading program (if we read a certain number of books we got a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut). I remember that library being huge (maybe it wasn’t; I was small). Mom would drop us off in the children’s books and tell us not to wander off while she went and looked for books in the grown-ups section.
My elementary school library at Mount Tabor Elementary was magical. It had carpeted pits of bright blue built into the floor with sloped sides you could climb in and out of and sit to read. It also had cushions and ladders so you could climb ON TOP OF the bookshelves to lounge around and read your book from up high. Some bookshelves also had compartments built in so you could basically just crawl into a cozy nook, inside a bookshelf, and read hidden away from your teacher and classmates. I think back on that now and can’t believe such an incredible space existed where kids were encouraged to climb and crawl and explore and read.
In the fourth grade, my family moved to rural Meade County, Kentucky. Of course, one of the first things mom did was take us to get our library cards. I remember the sinking feeling of disappointment we all had when we pulled up for the first time. It was a small white building, with very few windows. I remember the distinct “old” smell it had when we walked inside, and it seemed dark. There were so few books compared to the libraries I knew. I remember a pit of despair growing in my stomach and thinking, how could my parents move me to this place with such a terrible library? What backwards community is this new place we live? Despite my initial horror, the librarians were wonderful, and quickly introduced us to the concept of the interlibrary loan system. Which we wore out over the following years. (And in spite of the first impressions of a nine-year-old, Meade County was a wonderful place to grow up. I’m also happy to report that after I moved away for college, a big, brand new, beautiful library was built in the community. I try not to be too bitter that it didn’t happen until after I left.)
My new elementary school had an alright library. It wasn’t a magical retreat with cozy nooks and climbable bookshelves. But despite the heavy and not-so-comfortable wooden seats and the somewhat unpleasant school librarian who was always telling me to stop putting my feet on the chairs, it had a pretty good selection of books. My new Kentucky school introduced me to the concept of the Accelerated Reader program, or “AR”. With this program, every book is assigned a certain number of AR points based on how difficult it is to read. After you read a book, you log on to the AR program on the computer and take the test for that book. If you get all the questions right (proving you read and understood the book), you got all the AR points. Suddenly, reading was gamified.
I found out that my elementary school kept track of the AR points cumulatively. So the points built from kindergarten through 6th grade. One of the highest school accomplishments was reaching the “One Thousand Point Club”, which usually only 3-4 students in the entire school would achieve each year before they graduated and moved on to middle school. Transferring to this school as a fourth grader (and having no previous AR points to transfer since I was from out of state), I was at a significant disadvantage. As is telling of the type of kid I was, I not only reached the 1,000 point club before graduating but also became the top point earner in my grade, without even trying to do so. I also collaborated with the school librarian and learned how to create new AR tests and assign points to books I wanted to read that weren’t in the system.
As much as I loved reading, I absolutely hated reading books together as a class in school. Having the teacher read aloud was okay, but they could never read aloud nearly as quickly as I could read in my head, so I would keep a finger on the spot where the class was, and then read ahead at my pace. When the teacher called on students to read aloud around the room was especially painful. Listening to the other kids stumble over their words and struggle to sound things out grated on my patience. I hated these exercises were required when all it did was embarrass the kids who struggled and frustrate the kids who weren’t struggling. Even worse was when teachers between grades didn’t communicate with each other about what books they assigned. By the time I got to seventh grade, I had been required to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe THREE TIMES. It’s a good book, but it’s not required reading across three different grades good.
Unsurprisingly, the Scholastic Book Fair day was one of my favorite days of the year. We’d get a little catalogue to flip through a few days before, including what books would be available, and my mom would usually give us $5 or $10 to buy something we wanted. After college, an ex of mine lamented the inequity of the Scholastic Book Fairs, because he grew up in a very underprivileged home and his parents never had money to spare for things like that. He would spend those days watching all the other kids go home with new books, while his teachers made him stay behind, yet another reminder of how poor he was. I have never looked at the book fairs the same way since.
I don’t remember being drawn to a specific genre book as a kid. I just read whatever I could get my hands on. To prepare for writing this post, I looked up what books were popular for 4th-6th graders back in the late 90s and early 2000s (those years would have been 1999-2002 for me). And with every list I saw, I just nodded. “Yep, read that. Read that. Read that. Read that one. Mmmhmm.” Here’s a sampling of the ones I remember:
Bunnicula (Howliday Inn series)
The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and many others by Roald Dahl
The Babysitters Club (series)
Goosebumps (series)
The Boxcar Children (series)
Holes
The Giver
The Bobbsey Twins (series)
Hatchet
Island of the Blue Dolphins
Julie of the Wolves
A Wrinkle In Time
The Outsiders
Anne of Green Gables
Charlotte’s Webb
Bridge to Terabithia
Sideways Stories from Wayside School (series)
Encyclopedia Brown (series)
Hank the Cow Dog (series)
Harriet the Spy
Aliens Ate My Homework (series)
Animorphs (series)
Fudge and many others by Judy Blume
Ramona Forever and many others by Beverly Cleary
The Cricket in Times Square
Little House in the Big Woods
Where the Red Fern Grows (<< probably the first book that ever made me cry)
Where the Sidewalk Ends and many others by Shel Silverstein
My Side of the Mountain
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
How to Eat Fried Worms
The Face on the Milk Carton
The Bailey School Kids (series)
Choose Your Own Adventure (series)
And of course I can’t mention my elementary school / young reader development without mentioning Harry Potter. The Sorcerer’s Stone came out in 1997, and the Chamber of Secrets in 1998, but it wasn’t until the Prisoner of Azkaban came out in 1999 that I was clued in to the series. My mom picked up the books for us right after we moved to Kentucky. Even though my brother and I were well old enough to have read them on our own, my mom read them aloud to us. I think back on that fondly. My brother and I laying on the living room floor and listening to her read the fantastical stories about a group of kids the same age as us attending a school for witches and wizards. It was especially funny to us later, after we started re-reading the books on our own, and realizing that Mom had slaughtered the pronunciation of a lot of the character and place names. We, like everyone else in our generation, became super fans. Not the raving Potterheads that dressed up in cosplay and stood in line at bookstores. But still the kind that were desperate to get our hands on each new book as it came out so we could fly through it in a day to avoid spoilers from our classmates. And as soon as we’d finish, we’d be crushed that it’d be at least another year until the next installment.
Despite the extremely problematic issues today, the Harry Potter series was foundational to my development as a reader. It was the first book series I remember obsessing over and re-reading multiple times. And since the last book didn’t come out until the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, and the movies continued for many more years, it’s cultural influence and the way it changed the book industry (especially middle grade and young adult categories) is undeniable. It definitely shaped my identity as a fantasy and sci-fi reader, which is still my favorite genre to read today.
I have more to say on my development as a reader in middle and high school, but perhaps I’ll save that for another post, or a future episode of One for the Books.
