A Year Under a Rock

Some observations about a reading life…

 

In the beginning, I wasn’t a particularly strong reader.  I didn’t teach myself how to read, and once taught, I didn’t exactly excel at this new and novel (ha!) skill.  There were three reading groups in my first grade class, and I remember that I was in the second one—solidly average.  As a six-year-old I found that irritating, but not irritating enough to do anything about.  I had other things to do:  grasshoppers to catch, mud pies to bake, younger children to boss around.  And in a pinch, my mother could always be depended on to read to me and my brother from The Chronicles of Narnia or The Little House books or The Secret Garden.

 

Shortly after my seventh birthday, though, my family moved back to the United States, my mother went back to work, and I had to go to a new school in a new town and play with new friends.  We lived in kind of a rough neighborhood, and the family who occupied the other half of our duplex was…well, there was something seriously amiss in that family, and my mother forbade me from playing with their kids after their oldest daughter “playfully” slapped me one too many times.

 

Also, I experienced winter for the second time in my conscious memory, and I didn’t much care for it.  So I began staying inside and reading a lot–big books, chapter books like Little Women.  My mother had a collection of Louisa May Alcott hardbacks, and I worked my way through all of them, even the righteously boring ones (Jack and Jill, anyone?).  At the same time, mom got a job at the local library, and got into the habit of using the children’s room as my babysitter.  So I read things like The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Strawberry Girl, Indian Captive, The Borrowers…the list goes on and on.  In elementary school, they had some program at my school where if you read enough books, you’d get a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut.

 

I ate a lot of personal pan pizzas, y’all.

 

By middle school, I had become “That Girl Who Reads All the Time,” and I actually enjoyed the nerdfest that was Battle of the Books.  Seriously, there was a competition where all the local middle schools sent kids to go answer questions about a list of books drawn up at the beginning of every year, and I had a total boner for the whole thing.  I wrote a fifteen page summary of To Kill a Mockingbird for my fellow teammates; I wrote a thirty page summary of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

 

I was thirteen.

 

And yes, we totally won.

 

In my family, though, everyone reads like that.  My sister has annexed my old bedroom and my brother’s to more fully house her book collection; my dad is honestly afraid that one day, her bedroom is going to come through the ceiling because of the weight of all the books on her floor.  My brother will read anything that has swords and elves in it, which means that he’s probably read every fantasy novel ever written about twice.  My mother has cartons of romance novels stored under her bed, and my father is constantly raiding every branch of the local library for fresh suspense novels and biographies.

 

We once played Book Lovers’ Trivial Pursuit, and it nearly destroyed us as a family.

 

For every book I reviewed on this website in the last year, I probably read three that I never got around to writing up.  That is how obsessive I am.  I love reading, am passionate about reading, which is why I’ve been able to keep posting to this thing several times a week over the course of a year, and also why I’ve had such a hard time learning to not be such a bitch about authors when they disappoint me.  I spend enough time frequenting authors’ blogs to know that typically they’re really nice, witty people who give serious thought to and pour a lot of creative energy into their work; I don’t just want to take a big shit all over that like it’s nothing.  But I also don’t want to pretend that something is good when it’s not just on the off-chance that someone might google him- or herself and be hurt. 

 

Sometimes I find it hard to pull my punches just because I spend so much time reading, and I’m so invested in the worlds that other people have created that it angers me when I see sloppy, half-assed, mediocre work.  It pisses me off when I see someone writing women and People of Color as stereotypes, or constructing an entire plot out of clichés, or fucking up a perfectly good novel by pacing it poorly.  I’m a great audience because I care, I really care, about what you’ve just created, but I’m also a vicious critic because–again–I actually care. 

 

This past year has been all about trying to learn how to balance criticism with compassion.  I know I’ve rarely succeeded, but I’ve made the attempt, and I’m going to keep slogging on at it in 2009.  So here’s to 2008:  a good year.  And to 2009:  an even better one.

 

ETA:  No, the irony of posting this on the same page as my various rips on Cassandra Clare is not lost on me.  Oh, well.