She's passing on her love of books

I love books. Anybody who has ever been to my house knows that because books are everywhere. They are stacked two deep in the bookcases. They are piled at the top of the stairs. Books are here, there and everywhere.
One of the things that endeared me to my husband when we were first married was our weekly trip to the bookstore where we would each indulge in three or four paperbacks apiece. This was pure luxury after being married to a man who felt slighted whenever I even picked up a book.
Over the years our lust for the printed word has waned. I have developed a tendency towards getting an excruciating headache whenever I dive into a book and don’t emerge until several hours later. This wouldn’t be so bad if I could manage to stop reading before the story was finished.
Christmas is an excellent excuse to visit the bookstore. There are books named after my bonus grandson, Nate the Great. There are board books for Jacob and Nicky. These often have pictures of sharks or dinosaurs. There are princess books and horse books for the girls. If I ever won the lottery, I would go to the bookstore and purchase tons of titles to be doled out to the children, a few at a time. Then I would buy more for me.
This is not to say that I like every book ever written. We read “Lord of the Flies” in high school. I thought it was a horrible book. I do not want to read about children being cruel to each other. We read “A Thousand Splendid Suns” in the book group I attend. I still have nightmares about it.
One of the ladies in the book group remarked that she objected to foul language in books. The language doesn’t bother me. I consider blue words to be a sign of a lack of imagination. There are many more colorful ways to prove a point but sometimes the character in the story has no imagination.
What I object to is violence. Pure, gratuitous violence is always objectionable. It isn’t just the words on paper that bother me. It is that somewhere, somehow, the violence and cruelty depicted on the page happens to real people. I would rather leave the ugliness to the newspapers to report and keep the world of fiction as a pleasant diversion from reality.
A few years ago I bought a recordable book. The kids loved it. I am in search of another one this year. So far, the only ones I’ve found are books they already have. I used to record a book on tape and send both the book and the tape every week. They kept losing or breaking the tiny tape recorder and the parents finally asked that I quit sending them.
I miss reading to them. Although, I do not miss reading about the Komodo dragon versus the king cobra. By the time I left for home the last time I visited, I was as tired of the story as I had once been tired of reading “Green Eggs and Ham.”
Thanks to grandson Jacob’s love of sharks, I now know more about sharks than I ever wanted to know. Grandson Nicky likes the dinosaur books because it gives him an excuse to roar.
First grader, Emma, is a beginning reader and it is a new challenge to find books that are easy for her to decipher. Thank goodness they still teach phonics where she goes to school.
The bonus grandchildren are too big to be read to and I try to find stories for them that will hold their interest when they would rather be exploring the deer lease with their Pappy instead of curling up with a good story.
I love books. They take me to another world. Thanks to books, I know about Komodo dragons, sharks, princesses and many other things not taught in school. Now, if I could just find a recordable book to send to the grandchildren, I would be all set.[[In-content Ad]]