I imagine when Mariano Rivera’s mother sees him walking to the mound, she thinks “I’ve raised a world-class pitcher,” and her heart swells with pride. She couldn’t be more proud of his pitching, though, than I am of my daughter’s reading. I’ve raised a world-class reader.
Sonja’s earliest years were full of reading. Her father and I love to read; her grandparents read to her a lot; there were no television sets within fifty miles of her. At that time, before cable TV came to Vermont, there wasn’t much television available anyway because of geography. I think she was naturally inclined to books in any case. She always handled them purposefully, never tearing pages. We read to her all the time, but we didn’t try to teach her to read when she was just a baby. Honest we didn’t.
Then one day, just a few weeks before her third birthday, we were visiting friends who didn’t have children–or any children’s books. Sonja started searching through their bookcases, so they found for her a copy of Alice in Wonderland, thinking she’d enjoy the pictures. She sat down with the book, opened it, and began to read aloud. She actually read it. We didn’t have the book at home, so she couldn’t have memorized it. She started then and there with Lewis Carroll and hasn’t stopped.
Great readers do more than simply consume books. Some books are not worth finishing. Some books need to be read many times. A good book usually leads directly to at least three other good books. A great reader tolerates a lot of starting and stopping. From an early age, Sonja had several books going at once. This tormented her fourth-grade teacher in particular and Sonja was punished for not finishing one book before starting another. Fortunately, she was undaunted. I tried to be her advocate by advising the teacher that EVERYONE at our house read several books at a time. I might as well have confessed to conducting some kind of satanic rites.
A life of great reading is literally a life of love stories. One of my favorites involving Sonja started when she received an English assignment dealing with poetry. I think she was supposed to find a poem to write about–something simple like that. I offered her several books of poetry to look at and then went about my business. Her friend was stopping by to work with her on the assignment, so I had put out enough books for both girls to peruse. Shortly before the friend was due to arrive I heard a mad bustle.
“MOM!” said Sonja. “Do you have any more books by this guy RILKE?”
“Yes,” I said. “Several. Do you like Rilke?”
“Where are they?”
I found the books and handed them to her. She promptly took the pile and hid it under the couch.
“Why are you hiding the Rilke?” I asked.
“That’s the most amazing poetry I’ve every read,” she said. “I don’t want Adair to get it. I want to keep it for myself.”
Her other great reading attributes include producing incisive margainalia, obsessively reading entire oeuvres (see her comment on the Jack Kerouac entry in this blog!), and missionary zeal for writers, genres, and topics across a galactic span of interest. I could go on. I’m proud of Sonja’s writing, her artistic PROCESS [inside joke--sorry], her professional accomplishments. I have to say, though, that her life has a reader has exceeded my wildest hopes. A reading life is a life well-lived, a life any mother would wish for her child.
If you are a book, she will be fair and generous with you but never patronizing. If you are a book, you are very lucky if she picks you off the shelf. She is the reader you have been waiting for.
