A little bit about me, or how I became a voracious reader

Somewhere, I read that Lisa Kleypas wakes up at 4 AM so she could write before making her children ready for school and doing the housework. I couldn't believe someone was willing to leave her bed at that hour, but here I am, at 5 AM, after Hubbie left on a trip, and happily typing away. I guess that when you have a project that interests you, the time doesn't really matter (or when you have a real bad case of insomnia).

I was thinking about how sometimes Hubbie and I discuss what makes a child a reader - or, more precisely, how are we going to turn our future offspring into readers - and even though we still don't have an answer, I think the conditions that turned me into a reader are pretty reasonable.

They were:

1. My mom's example.

2. Having a lot of books available in my home, which were entertaining and readable.

3. Being forced to spend excruciatingly long periods of time without anything to do, and thus being bored to death.

1. My mom's example

I've always thought little kids are like little monkeys. I don't think that's an insult, only that children are closer to our primate ancestors. After all, they like to swing from things, and climb trees, and copy what their parent's are doing (until they hit adolescence, when they start doing the opposite).

I remember sitting next to my mom, she reading her book and I reading mine (and without understanding a word of it... I think I grabbed one of her Patricia Highsmith's novels). But I was doing the same thing as mommy, and I remember I felt so happy and comforted... Sadly, she went through a reader's block shortly after that and didn't read a book for years, until I lend her my copy of Open Season, by Linda Howard.

2. Having readable books lying around.

When I was little, we lived in a house with a spare room in the back. It was called "the guest room" but I don't remember any guest ever staying there. Mostly it was used as one of my sisters's atelier, where she kept her canvases and paintings. It also had a wall to wall bookcase.

Of course my parents provided me with suitable books for my age, but in this Aladdin's cave I found such jewels as Jacqueline Susann's The Valley of the Dolls, Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, and a collection of severely chopped masterpieces of literature, among them a less-than-100-pages Jane Eyre, complete with watercolor pictures. There was also a sugary sweet collection of novellas about Sissi, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, full with daring adventures and romance.

After I became the official bookworm of the family, my sisters sometimes lent me their books in secret - like Zana Muhsen's Sold, and Jeffrey Archer's Kane and Abel. My parents encouraged my addiction and used to buy me books, but it looked like they chose them as if they were going to read them. That's the only reason that explains that I received a book about Queen Isabella of Spain and a book about brazilian prostitutes when I was 10 years old - later my dad had second thoughts and took away the book about the brazilian girls, but I had already read it. And what's even funnier, some six months later we were shopping in the mall when he saw the same book in a bookstore and offered to buy it for me! He completely forgot he had taken it away before. I guess it had a really catchy title and there was nothing in the blurb about the p's.

The recollection about my childhood's readings wouldn't be complete without writing about the prolific Enid Blyton. This english teacher wrote about 100 children's books, about adventures, mysteries, schools, farms, you name it.

The first Blyton's book I read was a mystery about a dissappearing cat, which my mom bought me. Later, I was delighted to discover my school library had a selection of her books, as well as The Lone Tree Series, by Malcolm Saville. While I was reading them, they put them away in a small storing room adjacent to the library (the library was on the top floor of a very old house, and this storing room was like a small attic). Luckily the librarian knew me well - yeah, that's a surprise - and she allowed me to keep borrowing them. It's a shame they're hidden now. The were a lot of fun.

3. Being bored to tears.

I think the crucial turnpoint was being forced to spend long periods of time when my only - or funnier - distraction were books.

I'm not speaking about being locked in a room with only a book for a couple of hours, by the way.

Until I was well into my teens, whe used to travel every single weekend to my grandma's house. Grandma lived in another city, and it took about 2 hours to get to her house. And back. Sometimes longer, if it was a long weekend. 4 hours with nothing to do except to look at the scenery. And let's get real, when you're a child, you don't give a darn about it.

But the worst was that, after arriving at her house and having an italian style lunch, everybody went to sleep the siesta. Even the cat.

And for two more hours - until my grandpa woke up and went for a smoke - you couldn't make a peep.

Watch the TV? All the TV's were in the bedrooms, where the sleeping beautys rested. The cat was safe sleeping with my grandma. My sisters would claim they had to study and dissapeared with their boyfriends. And I was too young to be allowed to leave the house alone.

It was hell. I would roam through the house in tiptoe, trying to find something to play with, and later something to read.

The other problem was that all the books from that house had vanished. The only books I could ever find were an Agatha Christie's mystery and a history book belonging to my grandpa. And I really searched.

To find a magazine was like hitting the jackpot.

After a while I learned to bring a book with me. I would read it so many times during the weekends that later I could recite parts of it. It became a trick I was sometimes asked to perform by my mom, when we were returning home on Sunday and it was too dark to read in the car (my mom didn't let me use a booklamp because she was worried I'd hurt my eyesight). Other times, I would chew on my book until it looked as if a little mouse had been nibbling at the dog edges (I guess I might have been hungry. Or bored. Or maybe the book was like a pacifier).

As I grew older, the trips to grandma's house became a treat, and not only for the italian cooking and the teatime pastries. As she lived in a smaller and safer city than I did, I could walk to the downtown, or go to the pier or the beach. Of course, by that time I was a complete bookworm, and I waited eagerly for the moment when everybody would go to sleep. Then, I would be free to walk the 20 blocks to the downtown, eat an ice cream and hunt for books to my heart's content.