I was never much of a reader when I was young. Though my parents encouraged me to read, I never found it interesting enough. I don\u2019t know if school helped or not, since there were no books in my early years that I remember having read that excited me. My parents didn\u2019t read to me and I don\u2019t recall things that were read to me in elementary school.<\/p>\n
Each year we had to take standardized tests to determine our reading and math skills. I always scored well on those tests. I would be a year or two above my grade level, so I did know how to read. If anything, the books chosen by some of my teachers for me to read should have discouraged me.<\/p>\n
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In sixth grade one of the books that our class had to read was the unabridged version of the Three Musketeers<\/span>. I\u2019m not sure if I ever finished reading the whole thing.\u00a0 I certainly didn\u2019t like it, or understand most of it.\u00a0 In seventh grade it got worse. My teacher had us read both The Iliad<\/span> and The Odyssey<\/span>. Again I had little understanding of what I was reading despite my reading comprehension scores on tests.<\/p>\n There are some reading highlights that I do remember from my youth. I found a biography book on David Farragut, who was a famous American Civil war naval hero. I breezed through the book and was craving more, so I decided to try another biography and took a Landmark biography book on Thomas Jefferson. It was too slow for me, so again I lost interest in reading.<\/p>\n While most boys at the time were reading Hardy Boys mysteries and girls were either reading Nancy Drew or The Bobbsey Twins mysteries, I was not. I did try a Hardy Boys book once, but didn\u2019t like it. I believe my sisters had some Bobbsey Twins books, but I didn\u2019t even try them. I did find a series that I did get into. The series was Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. I read about 3 or 4 of them and really enjoyed them. There were more in the series which I was unable to obtain. I liked the series so much that I tried to mimic some of its writing. Instead of using the characters from the books, I used some of my friends as well as myself as the characters in the stories.<\/p>\n My 8th grade English teacher inspired me both to write and read a little. She read us the story, \u201cThe Most Dangerous Game\u201d from a book of stories about action and adventure. She got me to read the book and all of the rest of the stories in it.<\/p>\n I can remember some of the books that I was required to read in high school, like:\u00a0 Heart of the Midlothian<\/span> by Walter Scott, Moll Flanders<\/span> by Daniel DeFoe, Wuthering Heights<\/span> by Emily Bronte, A Tale of Two Cities<\/span> by Charles Dickens, and The Great Gatsby<\/span> by F. Scott Fitzgerald. As to Shakespeare I remember Hamlet and Macbeth. Even reading those today, I have trouble with the language.\u00a0 None of these readings, and I believe I read most of them, inspired me at all.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until I was in college and someone suggested I read the book Ice Station Zebra<\/span> by Alistair MacLean, that I finally got hooked on reading. Unlike trying a different book in the same genre, as I had tried with biographies when I was younger, all of MacLean\u2019s books were similar in excitement and action. I continued reading constantly until I had finished all of his books, anxiously waiting each new one he wrote. I followed MacLean\u2019s books with Robert Ludlum\u2019s books.<\/p>\n I finally had to stop reading all these adult novels when I began teaching and then began a long period of reading children\u2019s books. Now as a retired teacher I do occasionally get to read adult books again, however as a professional storyteller, I tend to spend most of my time reading stories in an effort to find ones to tell and I enjoy all of those.\u00a0 I guess I could say that I am now a reader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was never much of a reader when I was young. Though my parents encouraged me to read, I never found it interesting enough. I don\u2019t know if school helped or not, since there were no books in my early … Continue reading