Saturday, July 9, 2011

Times have changed and so have I

So this year I'm doing the 50 book challenge, in which you read 50 books in a year or roughly one book a week.
I have finished 14 books.
For those of you wondering, I am only 10 books behind.
Yeah.
But one of my rules is that they have to be books that I haven't read before. I make one exception to these rules.

You see, when I was little (Read: from the time I was born until my senior year of high school) my parents would read bedtime stories to me. When I was really little, they were picture books, and as I got older they progressed to chapter books. They'd alternate nights reading, and we'd usually have two books going on at once. When I was in third grade, my dad bought Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and that changed my life. We ended up reading the first three together until I decided that I wasn't happy with the one-chapter-every-other-night pace and I think I got through Goblet of Fire in a day and a half.
Back to bedtime stories.
So as my sister and I got older, the books that we'd choose of my parents would choose got more mature, and in some cases the books were a bit more mature than I was ready for (I think I was in 4th grade when we read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and after re-reading it I realize exactly how much I missed*).
So now, as an alleged adult, I'm rereading a lot of the books that we read together.

It's interesting to see how much more I'm getting out of these books that I heard so long ago.

I think I'm really lucky that my parents encouraged me to love reading so much. Until I was in 6th grade, we didn't have internet or video games in the house** and whenever I was bored or we had to wait somewhere we would always read books. My mom and I got through a lot of books when I was in 5th grade, because my sister's school started a half hour before mine did and the other kids in my class were kind of mean to me, so instead of playing on the playground before school we'd just sit in the car and read. Good for my reading skills. Not as good for my social skills.

____
*All of it. I missed all of it.
**We had computer games, though. I have memories of playing Zork and Doom and Quake with my father. Doom was "Big Bad Guy Game." I was pretty young back then, and the one thing I really remember is that I wouldn't watch him play unless he'd enabled Godmode, which I called "White Eyes" because the eyes of the sprite that represented the damage you'd taken glowed. By the time he'd gotten Quake, I was a bit older, and we used to always say, "The only good type of Skraag is a dead Skraag," because both of us hated those flying monsters.

1 comment:

  1. My mom and I used to sit in the car near my middle school before school, so I wouldn't have to face the mean middle school kids.
    But we didn't read. We pretended that everybody who walked by was a secret agent.
    Who has the cooler mom?
    (....Actually..... you, but that's beside the point.)

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