Originally published in the Miami News-Record, February 22, 2015
I was reading before I entered Kindergarten. Not that my mom
pushed me to be some kind of child prodigy, but (and this is conjecture since I
really don’t remember what went through my five-year-old brain) I’m thinking I
was just tired of not knowing what was going on around me and decided to learn
how to read so I could butt into grownup conversations and whatnot.
The summer between 1st and 2nd grade
Mom brought home a ton of Bobbsey Twins books and discovered all too quickly
that I could plow through one of those in under two hours. It wasn’t long
before she had to start rationing them out. I’m sure she tried to bargain with
me – an hour of outside time in exchange for a new book perhaps – but I’m sure
I didn’t bite. I hated the outdoors and would rather read my old already-read
books rather than trade a new one for sunshine.
She eventually handed me the stack and told me to have fun. By the end
of 2nd grade I had read nearly the entire Little House on the Prairie series. It wasn’t but a few years later
that I developed a taste for the fantasy and sci-fi genres and read and re-read
A Wrinkle in Time and its companions
many times over before I even hit 5th grade.
I devoured all of the Harry Potter books and I’ve written
here before about my love for nearly all of Stephen King’s works. I tried The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, but they were just too wordy
for even me, a lover of words. (Oh, my, but I do love the movies!) I’ve read Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales (both of those I bought to read again on my
own after we read them in Senior English),
Silas Marner, Little Women, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, and countless
other classics. When we were newlyweds, before we became homeowners, we moved a
lot. My husband once offered me $1000 if I’d just let him leave all of my books
behind in our apartment. I said no. We took them with us and just paid his
chiropractor bill.
I’ve read a LOT of really good books over the years. I’ve
read a few bad ones, but not many. See, I have this credo: Life’s too short to
read bad books. So if they don’t hook me, they aren’t read. If they are poorly
written, they aren’t read. If they are drivel, they aren’t read.
So no, I have not read Fifty
Shades of Grey nor any of its sequels. And I don’t plan to. Ever.
I won’t launch into a tirade about values and abuse. I won’t
give my opinion on sex outside of marriage. And I’ll tell you how any scenario
with me wearing a blindfold would go: I am horrible at
pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey because when I am blindfolded I get horribly dizzy
and I fall. There would be no fun and games for a blindfolded me – probably
only an ER visit for some anti-nausea medication and perhaps a broken hip.
All that being said, I will not be reading the
aforementioned books because I hear they are more poorly written than Twilight and I ONLY read those because at
the time I had a teen who had been bitten by the vampire bug (see what I did
there?) and I wasn’t about to let her read them without subjecting myself to
them first. Talk about needing anti-nausea medication. I took one for the team
there, but I won’t be embarking on a journey into a monochromatic world where
the one of the character’s eyes “smolder like embers”. If someone’s eyes are
smoldering, I’m grabbing a fire extinguisher and calling 911 because that, folks,
is not healthy.
And if I want to experience fifty shades of grey, I’ll just
look in the mirror at my hair.
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