“Book Love” by Jenny Kaczorowski
It began innocently enough: a brand new copy of Goodnight Moon and parents patient enough to read it to me night after night after night. But Goodnight Moon was the gateway drug for many of my generation, and I soon turned to more hard-core reads, such as Pickle-Chiffon Pie and Little Rabbit’s Loose Tooth.
In elementary school, our librarian fed us a steady supply of Shel Silverstein and Beverly Cleary. Once a year R.I.F. spread shiny new paperbacks on the school library tables and fed my addiction with one free book. Many a child joined the leagues of reading addicts after those visits. I was in love — obsessed, even. Libraries, bookstores, Scholastic fliers — I couldn’t get enough.
In middle school, melodrama ruled the day, usually with a good dose of paranormal phenomena thrown in. Christopher Pike and Lois Duncan kept me company every evening. My school work began to suffer. I neglected my friends, my family. I begged for one more chapter, one more paragraph whenever the outside world demanded my attention.
By high school I had turned to stealing books from my parents’ shelves. I smuggled battered Harlequins, travelogues, and classics to school, getting my fix between every class. Until I earned my drivers’ license. Then any book in the public library was fair game.
In college I majored in English, and learned to hide my addiction. I took to carrying classics and slim volumes of poetry to literature classes filled with snobby students who looked down on genre fiction and, like me, pretended they did not read themselves to sleep each night with a good novel.
I’ve gone through other phases: young adult lit in grad school, mysteries after that. I found others who share my addiction. I no longer feel shame when I crack open a paperback in public and smell the fresh paper, admire the shiny cover, delve into each seductive story, because I now know that I am not alone.
For most of us, an addiction to reading is not picky. Suspense, historicals, science fiction, classics, contemporary literature — we’ll read it all. In the end, even cereal boxes and shampoo bottles are appealing if there’s nothing else. Because after a lifetime of addiction, a junkie can always find the next fix.
The cereal boxes! I’m not the only one!!
Everyone thinks I’m crazy because I will literally read anything with words nearby, including the cereal boxes and the back of my deodorant. It’s an addiction, definitely. I mentioned casually to my mother-in-law that I read about a book a week and her jaw dropped and she said something like, “Must be nice to have the time,” and I felt rather dejected. Addicts don’t have the time – they make it because it matters to them. Just cuz I’m currently unemployed, I do other stuff, too. I just prefer to read. ^_^
Thanks for the memories. Oh, Scholastic fliers.
I will read the side of pencil if I can’t find anything else.
Caryn~
The CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE books often led to death. And then I’d try to remember exactly what I picked the last time. Led to lots of frustration but I learned how to ask the question “What if I did this?”. Which led to my writing.
My book addiction came in stages. It started with Scholastics and stopped. The somewhere down the road, I accidentally stumbled into Christopher Pike. Again, it stopped. It wasn’t until years later that I finally picked it up again and decided to take it a step further by writing my own. I can honestly say I’ve stayed true to my “creepy” genre.
Jess, it so annoys me when people imply that I have a lot of extra time floating around just because I read. My first response is usually to ask them, “And how much television do you watch each week?”
LOL, Allan! I’m the same way.
Liane, I hadn’t thought about that, but you know, I’ve heard lots of writers say that their writing begins with “What if…?”
Marcia, I’ve definitely gone through phases, too. Right now, for example, I’ve been doing so much writing and, yes, blogging, that I haven’t done as much reading as I’d like. But then, most of my hobbies are like that.