Saturday, July 17, 2010

The Lost Art of Reading

We readers are a dying breed! Being a former Reading teacher of course I'm an advocate of reading. In fact, every year about this time, when summer vacation starts, I think to myself...will this be the year you buy that old ice cream truck, load it with books, and head across this beautiful country to give away books(I don't have kids so it would be do-able). I will do it someday. I always loved when I lived in Newport, RI every Wednesday, the Book Mobile would park across the street from my house. The Book Mobile was a truck from the Newport Library that you could check out books. How cool is that. So maybe that is where I should start. Locally. Since I live in a city that doesn't even have a book store...it kills me! I think it's so important to model reading to the younger generation. I learned it from my parents.

My parents are very inspirational. They grew up during the Depression(I'm the youngest of five--an oooops baby, really, so I'm not as old and you might think ;-) )and they barely finished, what we'd call middle school. My parents had to quit school and go to work to help the family. By the time I was born, my father was a carpenter and my mom was a stay at home mom, but for as long as I remember, going to the library was a weekly event. When we got to the library, my dad would read the periodicals about finance(stocks mostly) because with five kids having a magazine subscription would have been frivolous. My mom would search out crime and romance novels. And I'd be reading Romona the Brave(is it weird that I want to see this movie?) or the latest Judy Blume. At home, my mom always had a book in her lap...ALWAYS. So we thought this was normal behavior. The reason I'm telling you all this is because of a conversation I had with one of my brothers yesterday. We were talking about cable television. I was griping at how expensive it was. He said, get rid of it! If we all went back to reading, they'd(the cable co) get it! He's right, of course, but to hear my burly-also a carpenter-high school educated-brother tout the importance of reading, it just furthered my conviction of how important it is to model this behavior, because that was my mother's influence, right there. I knew he was an avid reader because he'd read right along with his three children. And I knew when and if they struggled with a book, he was reading that same book right along side of them. He went on to say that he'd severely limited the amount of channels he was getting from the cable company, and how that didn't go over so well with the family at first, but they were coming along to the idea. So this is the reason for this blog today.

I wanted to share with you my favorite top 5 books of all time and I'm hoping you all respond with your faves, too!!

5. Fall on your Knees--Anne Marie Mac Donald
4. The Life of Pi--Yann MArtel
3. The Kite Runner--Khaled Hosseini
2. Five Quarters of an Orange--Joanne Harris
1. A Fine Balance--Rohinton Mistry

I love to share books with friends. The best way to find out about a good book is a recommendation from a fellow reader, but I have another tip: I put in one of the books I just mentioned above, into Amazon and it will provide a list of other books I might like. BUT even better than that, I read the reviews about one of the above mentioned books and I click on the people that wrote them to see what other books they liked. It's a bit stalker-ish, but a good way to find additional book!

1 comment:

  1. My mom read to me all the time! She always brought me to the Fall River Public Library to take out books! I really do believe this is what made me the avid reader (not to mention English major/teacher) I am today. My 5 favorite books are:
    1. The Catcher in the Rye- J.D Salinger
    2. The BellJar -Sylvia Plath
    3. Wuthering Heights -Emily Bronte
    4. Great Expectations- Charles Dickens
    5. Romeo and Juliet -Shakespeare

    Notable Fav's

    Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
    Little Women
    Water for Elephants
    Authors
    Jennifer Lancaster
    Chelsea Handler
    Charlainne Harris
    Stephanie Meyer
    James Patterson

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