
The Long Summer of Not-Reading
While we at the Riot are taking this lovely summer week off to rest (translation: read by the pool/ocean/on our couches), we’re re-running some of our favorite posts of 2014. Enjoy this Best Of, and we’ll be back to your regularly scheduled programming on Monday, July 7th!
This post originally ran March 17th.
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It was the end of the school year before the one we’re in right now, and I was about to go into my kids’ room and read chapters of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and I was really dreading it.
I was dreading it, because it was an act of reading, and without my quite understanding how it had happened, the act of reading, when it involved my kids, had turned into a gigantic problem. Reading assignments coming home from school were the source of all sorts of fights. Getting them to be still and listen to me reading Harry Potter was a series of interruptions with me yelling at them, then finally getting so frustrated that all the fun went out of doing the reading. More frustrating still was realizing that they were zoned out and not paying an ounce of attention to anything that had happened.
Two days ago, Zach got to stay up late for the weekend, provided he stay in bed and just read. He read something like fifteen books, all of them terrific (most of them science. The kid is obsessed with science and history.). He was so excited to have read so many that this morning, he sat with a notebook and began keeping a Reading Journal…just like me. (My handwriting is better though. Nyah nyah.)
Yesterday, I gave him free reign of the huge coffee table books I have filling up shelves, and he spent hours pouring through huge books on the Universe, on Coral Reefs and Mythology and Charles Dickens and a mammoth tome covering every single day in the 20th Century. He has half a dozen bookmarks sticking out of books on my shelves now, fluttering around. His bookshelf is so overloaded, it’s in danger of collapsing. It’s so regularly picked through, I have to reorganize the damn thing every single day. I don’t mind.
I wish I could say that at the start of summer, I’d had a grand plan here and a lot of faith, but I didn’t. What I had was two fairly simple opinions. One, that I love ‘im and I don’t want to spend all my time fighting with him, not even over reading. And Two, as I said before…reading should be come to willingly and with excitement, and not forced. If he came back to it excitedly, I would be thrilled. If he didn’t, well, it’s not the end of the world. We would’ve found other stuff to be excited over.
But fortunately, he came back to reading, and I am over the moon. Not least because I am having so much fun reading Harry Potter, with as many voices and accents as I can keep straight, and a son who perks up and interrupts me to tell me what the word “Sirius” really means.
My handwriting is better than his. Nyah.