A love of reading
I would love to think that reading just happens. I picked up Encyclopedia Brown 30 years ago and never stopped. But as I sit here with my 2 year old and her Sleepy Puppy book, I'm keenly aware that's not the whole story. In a world where Netflix is an always available babysitter, it may be worth talking about how readers are made.
My mom and Dad both read to me. They were usually Bible stories, particularly at first. My memories of those sessions tend to revolve around The Hobbit and all 7 books of The Chronicles of Narnia. My dad taped our nightly reading sessions, so that I could relisten to them whenever I wanted. I must have listened to A Horse and His Boy 20 times.
In elementary school, I remember the Pizza Hut Book It! promotion, a local library summer reading contest, and Mrs. Boyd's semester long reading contest. All of them offered inexpensive prizes... but ones that were meaningful to the targeted audience. I read voraciously to win those prizes, but the habit of reading continued with me long after that.
Graduate school nearly killed the reader in me, something that I've heard from other graduate students as well. Nothing like being forced to read large volumes of non-fiction at high speed and with your future on the line to make you resent it. Fortunately, a good dose of Jim Butcher, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Tanith Lee administered slowly and for fun helped cure me of that bad taste.
My very own urban fantasy Frostbite comes out in paperback in 15 days. Whether it will be as big of a hit as Sleepy Puppy or My First Book of Numbers, I don't know. But I'm appreciative that people used similar titles to teach me to read and hope that we don't let the love of reading die out.
My mom and Dad both read to me. They were usually Bible stories, particularly at first. My memories of those sessions tend to revolve around The Hobbit and all 7 books of The Chronicles of Narnia. My dad taped our nightly reading sessions, so that I could relisten to them whenever I wanted. I must have listened to A Horse and His Boy 20 times.
In elementary school, I remember the Pizza Hut Book It! promotion, a local library summer reading contest, and Mrs. Boyd's semester long reading contest. All of them offered inexpensive prizes... but ones that were meaningful to the targeted audience. I read voraciously to win those prizes, but the habit of reading continued with me long after that.
Graduate school nearly killed the reader in me, something that I've heard from other graduate students as well. Nothing like being forced to read large volumes of non-fiction at high speed and with your future on the line to make you resent it. Fortunately, a good dose of Jim Butcher, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Tanith Lee administered slowly and for fun helped cure me of that bad taste.
My very own urban fantasy Frostbite comes out in paperback in 15 days. Whether it will be as big of a hit as Sleepy Puppy or My First Book of Numbers, I don't know. But I'm appreciative that people used similar titles to teach me to read and hope that we don't let the love of reading die out.
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How I Learned to Love the Bomb
A blog talking about how life forced me to be a writer and I couldn't be happier about it. Topics should include writing with children, mental health issues, discrimination, and science fiction.
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