Books! They have always been important to me. I am not sure why or when I fell in love with them only that I did. I believe that the quality and character of a person is in so many ways shaped and defined by the books that they read.
My reading history however, is not like so many other avid readers. It is a story of struggle and compromise that still today plagues me as I pour through so many books. My earliest memories of books are of my mom reading bible stories from a children’s illustrated bible story book. The book was white with 1980 cartoon David and Goliath, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and the Twelve Disciples racing over the pages of the hardback. My sister and I were piled up on my mother’s bed as she read the stories one by one to us. My sister, even then the resentful rebel, begged for my mother to pick up another book, but my mother, the staunch Christian, continued reading her meek stubbornness against my controlling sister’s desires. I, always willing to please my mother, sat glued as she read through the stories. I remember been enthralled as the young boy David shrugged off the armor of the king to face the giant alone with only three smooth stones. The stones, still vivid in my mind’s eye, were smooth spirals of black, green and gray like a cat’s angry eye. I was hooked. I knew then I wanted to read, but with that first spark, the fire was long in igniting, and like so many other things in my life, my reading ability would come late.
I remember starting school with a lot of promise. My grandmother, whom I stayed with before starting school had worked diligently with me on my letters in sounds, and although, I am sure I went to school with my b’s sounding more like the sound a bumblebee hum’s between flowers than the sound that comes before the word ‘bunny’, I still felt smart. I felt like reading was the next step, and honestly, I am not sure what happened. I slowly, fighting-at-every-step, struggling with sounding-out-each-word, learned to read. But by then the magic was gone.
It wasn’t until I reached sixth grade, still in the elementary school, that I found I loved what books could bring. Enter, Mrs. Barbara Newman. Mrs. Newman whom I had known my entire life as one of my mother’s best friends and a member of our church, entered the room on the first day with an excitement that was infectious. She made me love reading, as she seemed to select novels to read to the class that seemed chosen just for me. Summer of the Monkeys, Where the Red Fern Grows, and Old Yeller, to name but a few. Mrs. Newman also did something that my earlier teachers so rarely did for their students, she worked with us in small groups and one-on-one sessions. I remember learning so much that year, but most importantly I had found the love of reading again.
After Mrs. Newman my life as a reader became more about the books I chose and less about the people who introduced them to me. In seventh and eighth grade I still had great reading teachers that introduced great books to me, but I found that by trial and error, I could select books from the high school library, which fit into what I wanted to read. I discovered more outdoorsy books and then discovered Walter Farley and his Black Stallion Series. I read all the ones in our school library and then managed to twist my money-strapped mother in to purchasing the others for me.
However, my exciting life with books would soon begin to affect the ole so social life that most middle-school-aged children keep at the forefront of their minds. I was not one of those children, and like I said before, I was a late bloomer and the social aspects of my life had not dawned on me until the bookworm persona was firmly planted onto my small frail shoulders and it was a persona that forever followed me throughout middle and high school. I did manage with some act of the imagination to become a social bookworm, but I was never the most popular kid in school and often times I felt isolated from other kids my own age. Kids who worried more about winning the next football game than which book they would read next. I think it was this isolation that lead me to find the J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. It was my first fantasy book and as I read it I felt like I was discovering something, which had forever been hidden from me.
To say that a new world was open to me is an understatement. I read all of Tolkien’s books and moved on to the Narnia series. After those two series, I began exploring more obscure authors, many of which I cannot even recall their names. I fought alongside knights, battled dragons, and explored with elves. The dreadful days of high school melted away as I championed with the Companions of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books and watched as Merlin unwove the tale of Arthur Pendragon in Mary Stewart’s Arthurian Saga quintet. I discovered quickly that those who read fantasy in the South are very few. My aunt Martha was one of the few. She was an avid reader. Retired for medical reasons, she always had something to read. Many times it was the latest version of Star magazine, but occasionally buried beneath her ashtray and gossip chronicles I would find a haphazardly displaced mystery, or a well worn fantasy novel. She would always let me burrow them with the promise that I would return them on our next visit.
After high school, I entered college with a love of books under my belt and a proud walk to my step as I entered my English classes. The level of these courses was much more difficult than what high school had been, and the variety of books was meager at best. Nothing abnormal, nothing besides the classics. I was bored. So, I continued my search for great unknown authors on my own at the local bookstores, always finding myself in the fantasy section. It was during one of these missions that I found what would become my favorite author, Robin Hobb. Her novels were so different than anything I had ever read. Where other author’s worlds slid over you as you read, her novels painted your mind. Her characters crawled into the dark recesses of your mind and took up residents. Her plots held you captive and bound you so that you couldn’t ever stop thinking about what would happen next. At the time she did not have many books out and I found myself desperately waiting for each new book’s release.
Over the years, Robin Hobb and her characters have become like good old friends. Friends that after not seeing for months on end pull a chair up at the kitchen table with a good cup of coffee and spill the darkest secrets since their last visit. And it is like these friends that Robin Hobb and her books have changed my life. After reading such stellar fantasy, no other fantasy book compares. I still wait for her books to come out so I can devour them like a rescued castaway, but in between their release, I enter a desert of shallow reading.
Ten years after discovering Robin, I still find myself searching for another great fantasy writer, but with no luck. And a person whose composition is told through the books he reads seems a shell of himself when the books he loves are void of the passion they once taunted him with. Yet now, the books are changing, as I feel is my life. Reading, my first mistress, is now branching into more sophisticated avenues and books from other genres are now tantalizing me from the shelves of the closest Barnes and Noble. Namely fantasy’s inseparable cousin science fiction. Most recently, I have dived into Suzanne Collins Hunger Games and Catching Fire, and Orson Scott Card ‘s Ender Games. But it doesn’t end there as other great literary works jump out to be read like Jim Fergus’s One Thousand White Women. So, as I read these new books, I feel more grown up. I feel empowered like my new critical eye has made me a connoisseur of reading, and with this new power, I feel that the shape of my character and the quality of my person has bloomed into something all together new. I must say I am excited to see what new adventures my life of books will take next.
