Getting Old...

I have a hard time admitting it. But I guess one is getting old when checking out large print books from the library.

I went to the library the other day. I had just finished the John Irving novel  In One Person. It's about transgendered and bisexual people. I liked that book a lot but it kind of left me sad and depressed. I love John Irving as a general rule, but this one was very tough to get through. The book had 400 something pages too. Night after night I'd fall asleep after about reading 25 pages. Was it the sad content or my failing eyesight? I even lost a competition with my daughter in who would finish the book they were reading first. Cost me a $1. So I told the nice ladies at the library I needed something to cheer me up.

I wanted to read something in large print and a book that was funny. Success! I checked out Can't Wait to Get to Heaven by Fanny Flagg. It's the story of an old lady named Elner Shimfissle. She is my new hero. I hope to grow a little bit more like her every day.

Maybe time to get some reading glasses?

Baby loves to Read

And here is baby sitting on her fine new tush enjoying a good read. I had to take a photo of her and her book. Reading is so important. We need to teach the children early. Best when they are babies. Always have lots of books, magazines, and newspapers around. I came across this great quote by Nora Ephron the other day. Since Nora Ephron recently passed away this quote has been pasted all over the internet.

It's such a great quote it cannot be repeated enough:

“Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

I guess what I would like to add to this great quote is: Don't limit yourself to certain type of media. Read a wide variety of materials including newspapers.

A friend of mine told me recently about a study her twin girls are part of. She had to fill out a survey on reading habits in the household. The mom was supposed to check off what reading materials her family kept around the house. Guess what? Newspapers weren't even on the list. So my friend took a pencil and added it as an option to the survey. Obviously the person who wrote the survey does not get a daily newspaper. The idea of reading a paper was so remote to them it didn't even make it on the list.

Will newspapers be able to survive? My husband and I do get the Denver Post. Like generations before them, our kids started their newspaper journey with Sunday cartoons . Now my 13-year-old always gets up and looks for the sports section first thing in the morning. My 11-year-old loves to read out loud to us dramatic stories about car accidents and wildfires. Some days I want to hide the paper from her...

Do you still get a daily paper and encourage your children to read the paper? Are my and I dinosaurs because we still get a paper?

Recipe for Raising Readers

I have often wondered where the love of reading comes from. Is there a recipe for raising good readers? Does it get handed down from parents to children? Is it merely a matter of parents reading to infants and toddlers like parenting books tell us? Or is it mainly the job of schools  and educators to foster a love for books in children?

I suppose in my case the love for reading did not come through my parents. They were not great readers themselves. I never saw my parents read books. My dad only read the paper. My parents never took us to a library to check out books nor did they read books to us, except for the standard Grimm fairy tale edition, owned by every German household. I figure my mom, who had not much schooling, did the best she could by reading fairy tales to us.

There were certainly lots of books around our house when I was growing up. My mom had aquired an eclectic selection of novels via membership of a mail order book club in her pre-married life. My dad's books were mostly antique tomes about religion and history, some with fancy covers that would make you want to leaf through and admire the beautiful pictures. Dad's books were mostly printed in old German type and not accessible to a young child. I also distinctly remember a book with pictures from WWI and WWII. I am not sure why this horrible book sat  around on one of the lower shelves. It certainly made an impression on me as a young child...

So maybe osmosis - being surrounded by a number of books - was a factor, since there wasn't much encouragement to read on my parents part. I recall my love for reading started in first grade. It was then, I bought my first book with my own money. I had saved up my allowance to purchase a book of fairy tales printed in cursive. In those days German kids were taught to read and write in cursive. We were never allowed to print letters. I'm not sure if they still teach kids that way in Germany. I surely loved learning to make those curly letters, lessons in Schoenschreiben (transl. writing prettily), and my first book that I could read by myself.

Maybe books were my way to escape the reality of a not so happy childhood. The Catholic girls' school I attended from 5th through 13th grade had a fairly small library with juvenile fiction tucked away under a stairwell somewhere. Only the older kids could use the "real" library while the younger students were limited to the "stairwell library" run by the nuns. It was the strangest little library you can imagine, but I read every book in it. I cannot recall ever being bored in my childhood. How could you be bored when there were so many great books to read?

It's harder these days to find the time for reading. After a long day of doing chores around the house, cleaning, cooking, taking care of the kids, crafting, and working on the computer one gets too tired at night to read. Is that how my parents felt? Usually I fall asleep after a few pages.

But we try to set a good example for our kids. We make regular trips to the library and have done so since they were infants and old enough to attend story time events.  Yet I find it terribly hard to compete with the thrills of electronic devices around these days. There was no Nintendo to tempt me, no computer screen calling to play evermore addictive games, no XBox or Wii.  In a way it was much easier for a child in the 1970s to become a reader...

Maybe it would be easiest to ban all those things from one's house completely. But how can I, when the children see me sit and work at my computer every day?  So I see my role as parent mainly as a guide and role model. I try to set a good example by limiting my own computer time. I try to steer them away from screen time as much as possible - less than 1 hour per day. Have you tried to do a family reading night? I know after a busy day it's seems so much easier to pop in a movie. But really if you tried,  you might find that sitting together reading books a couple of nights a week may be just as relaxing...

What's the last book you have read? With or without children? For Christmas my son gave me the bestselling books (see picture)by Stieg Larson. I really got into them on one of our "family reading nights" and read them in less than a week's time. Looks like Ulla - the voracious childhood reader is back! Any book suggestions for me?

What are you reading? A Thousand Splendid Suns!

It's been a while since a book took hold of me completely. In a different life, before I had children, I used to be an avid reader. These days I am lucky if I can manage to get through ten pages before I fall asleep at 9pm on a weekday night. The other day, I came across the book A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. I admit, I have never read The Kite Runner - Hosseinis other famous book turned into a movie. A little while ago, it seemed, everybody was talking about it: parents at school, people at church, friends and relatives, every reading group in town was discussing it. Except for me. I don't really know why I avoided it.

My husband is an English teacher, so he often leaves "a book or two" around the house. This week I stumbled upon A Thousand Splendid Suns laying on the sofa and started reading it. I could not put it down all afternoon - only stopping for brief periods, when the kids came home from school, or when it was time to cook dinner and set the dinner table. I read until late into the night. I just had to finish it.

A Thousand Splendid Suns tells the story of two Afghan women, during the tomoultous times of Russian occupation and the taliban regime, from the 1960s through 2003.

I guess part of the reason this book totally drew me in, is the fact that I grew up in a very disfunctional household myself, and I could relate to the story on a very personal level...Maybe someday I'll be able to write about it. The harsh images of of physical and emotional abuse described in the novel are certainly not for the faint of heart.

Besides being a great book to learn about recent Afghan history, I recommend this book as a great story of survival. Time magazine's Lev Grossman praised it as a "dense, rich, pressure-packed guide to enduring the unendurable." I couldn't have said it any better. Some passages are hard to get through. The kind of hurt that human beings are capable of doing to one another seems unbelievable. In the end the lesson learned to me is, that it does not matter where you live on this planet, you can find abusive husbands and wicked people in any nation under the sun.
Yet in the harshest of circumstances we must keep our chin up and fight for our happiness. Having a good friend by your side is crucial for survival.
Once we get past all the horrors described, we find that the book is a really a celebration of life. Life - in it's most basic form! Don't you ever forget to cherish the simple things: the splendid sunrise over the city, a cup of tea shared with a friend, or the mere fact that you are able to take a breath! Then get up and walk away from the abuse!