I’m a reader. That very well may be the understatement of the century. I read incessantly, voraciously, and can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t have at least three books on the go at any one time. As a young girl I gobbled up Judy Blume’s books, the adventures of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, The Island of the Blue Dolphins and other O’Dell books, The Outsiders and S.E. Hinton’s quasi-sequel novels.
Before the age of 11 I graduated to what would remain a standard love of mine, Science Fiction and Fantasy, with books like The Mists of Avalon and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I gobbled up books by Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, C. J. Cherryh, William Gibson, Ursula Le Guinn, and Raymond Feist, to name a very few, faster than they could write them.
Into my adulthood I’ve continued to read at the average pace of 3-5 books a week, depending on how busy my week is. Admittedly, there are the really crazy weeks where I can’t spare enough time to finish a single novel, but then there are the slow weeks, when the teenager is away visiting friends or relatives, and I’ll get through a dozen books. I’ve always maintained that sleep is way overrated, and I often opt for only 5-6 hours of sleep a night to get a few hours of reading in.
So given all of this, you can imagine how disappointed I was that my daughter didn’t seem t o be nearly as interested in books as I’ve been. As a child she loved to be read to, and she learned to read for herself before she started Kindergarten, but it was never a priority for her. We read her the first three of the Harry Potter books, and then there was a span of several years during which she saw the first three movies, grew considerably, and forgot much of the first three books that were all read to her before she turned 5. When it came time for the Goblet of Fire to be made into a movie, she picked up the book and read most of it, but at what I considered an abysmally slow pace. Despite being a huge fan of the movies, she just didn’t seem to be invested in the characters of the book as much, especially as they referred back to things in the first three books that she couldn’t remember. She was slightly better with The Order of the Phoenix, but as the release of The Half Blood Prince film approaches she’s less than 1/3 of the way through the book which she started earlier this year.
For a long time I’ve blamed myself. I didn’t encourage her to read enough or offer her the right incentives to read. As a single mother for most of the last half of her life, our schedule is a bit crazy leaving her little time for any leisure activity. When I was young, school got out at 2:30 and I was home before 3:00. Even with homework and chores I still had several hours a day for reading. We leave our house at 6:45 in the morning and she starts school at 7:30, it’s 5:30 most days before I pick her up at school, and if we have no errands to run then maybe she’s home by 6:00. Dinner, walking the dogs, and then homework, and she’s lucky to be done and in bed by 10.
I also thought perhaps the availability of quality TV/movies that filled her need for fantasy and science fiction had a lot to do with it. I read myself into space adventures and although Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica, and the original Star Trek did have me hooked, they came along much later in my adolescence. Perhaps she never felt the need to read about space fiction when she’d grown up on 4-different Star Trek “Next Generation” series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Farscape, Stargate SG1 and Atlantis, Firefly/Serenity, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and Spiderman, Batman, Fantastic 4 and X-Men moves right and left. The age of being able to bring high-quality science fiction and fantasy to the screen had arrived with a vengeance. So, while she would wait with baited breath for the next episode of Buffy or Star Trek, she never showed any interest in the companion books that had been written about those series. Even the Lord of the Rings movies, which she lived and breathed for from the time the first one was released, never spurred her to pick up the books to see how they compared, or even to read The Hobbit, of which no (good) movie had ever been made.
Now don’t get me wrong, she does read. She’s read the biography of her biggest hero, Dr. Sally Ride, and other books here and there over the years. Usually though they are either non-fiction books about space or astronauts, or fiction books based slightly on real events of the same type. She read all the assigned books for English Lit classes, getting through The Outsiders and Of Mice and Men very well, and absolutely crawling through The Scarlet Letter. Still by her age I could have finished The Outsiders in an hour easily, and she seemed nowhere near that point. Her reading comprehension scores on her SAT’s were way above her grade level every year, putting her at the college level on her last years SAT’s, so it wasn’t that she didn’t read well, she just didn’t seem interested in reading for pleasure.
So, I resigned myself to the fact that maybe she would just never have the same interest in reading fiction that I did. Maybe it was the scientist in her, she was just too focused on her goal of making it into space, and maybe she would just be one of those scientists who spent all of their time reading the latest theories and publications. I was ok with that, in that her focus was admirable and it would surely help her attain her goals to keep that focused, but still I felt she was missing an extremely important part of stimulating the imagination.
Then it happened, the phenomena called “Twilight”, and I learned that all you need to turn a kid who is a decent reader into a reading addict, is the right motivation.
First, you start with a subject that she’s always found extremely interesting and romantic: Vampires. She grew up watching her parents and their friends play the Vampire: The Masquerade role playing game, and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Blood Ties, and Moonlight. She’s had a crush on Spike from BtVS for years. Dracula to her is not Béla Lugosi, it’s Gary Oldman! In her world vampires are tortured, noble creatures who fall in love with the girl but refuse to get “involved” because they consider themselves too dangerous, old, unworthy etc. Unrequited love, the biggest draw of every hopeless romantic.
Next you add peer-pressure. All of her friends had read the books and could talk of nothing else. They awaited the movie release with a frenzy and their excitement began to rub off on her.
Finally, you add an impending movie release starring, as the noble and tortured vampire, “The sexiest, cutest guy ever.” (That’s a direct Morgan quote folks).
The result, Thursday morning Morgan picked up my copy of Twilight. Despite spending 6-7 hours at my sister’s house for Thanksgiving, where her cousins kept her constantly engaged, she finished it by 10 AM Friday morning. She read all through the night, sleeping from 4:30 am to 8:00 am, and lo and behold she discovered she could eat a 544 page book for breakfast!
That night she moved on to New Moon, book two of the series, and conquered that 608 page book by Sunday morning. She would have finished it Saturday except I insisted that she stop reading long enough to finish the 5 days of homework she would be missing during her trip to Japan next week.
So, with two 12 hour flights to and from Japan next week I expect she will easily finish the last two books in the series. Now we’ve confirmed she has the aptitude, and the desire to read like the book consuming monster her mother is, all she needed was the right motivation!
