Literary Narrative

I became a reader the year that my parents divorced. At this time, my father set up a new household with a new wife just a few miles away. The new house included a bedroom for me and a bookcase filled with my new step-sister’s old books. The unknown stepsister was away at college. I was in third grade.

My dad’s new wife didn’t approve of television, and while we had a little Macintosh SE, the internet wouldn’t be online for another three to five years. I explored the garden a lot, and when it got too hot outside, I came inside and stared at my invisible step-sister’s bookcase. The books were mostly children’s mystery series: Nancy Drew, Trixie Beldon and the Hardy Boys. The Secret Garden was there, too, and The Hobbit.

Before this, I knew how to read, but I hadn’t read much for fun. And I certainly wasn’t “reading for fun” now. I was reading because I was bored, but that’s as good a reason as any. Every-other-weekend, when I visited my dad, I would pick out two or three or four books and then spend the entire weekend on the couch reading them.

If I were to extrapolate my own literacy history into a larger context, I would say that reading has to be discovered. What I mean is that while first I came to reading unwillingly (there was nothing to do, so I felt “forced” to read), I eventually found a type of book and story that I enjoyed. I bought in to the idea of reading for pleasure, and then I couldn’t be stopped.

Is there some way to encourage students to discover reading for themselves? One approach may be to introduce a wide variety of styles and topics for reading in a class in hopes that students will find something to connect with. Another idea is to require students to read X# of pages during a semester, but the topic of writing can be of their own choosing—from car maintenance to sports history to Flemish painting. As students specialize in their chosen area, they may learn to love reading in its own right. Or they may decide they hate car maintenance after all.