I only remember one time that my mother read to me, and it was a part from Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
We sat on the front stoop of our apartment building, which I considered the "fancy" entrance. No one except strangers ever visited from the front of the building. My mother was in the Book of the Month Club and received monthly selections. The fat leather-bound books she put out for decoration became my reading fodder at an early age. I don't remember a time that I did not read. I don't remember when the black squiggles on a page began to make sense. I wish I did. I wish I could remember the exact moment when words revealed themselves, but I don't. And I always read on my own.
Except for this evening. On this late summer evening, my mother and I sat on the front stoop of our apartment and she read to me about Aunt Polly, a troublemaker named Tom, and some toast with jam. I can't say I was very excited. In fact, Aunt Polly seemed unnecessarily mean, while Tom came across as just plain annoying.
As the years passed, I had no guiding teachers, no adults who pointed me on any particular reading path. I just pored over the thin paper Scholastic catalogs that were handed out to my first grade class, choosing the Little House books and anything else that caught my eye. Discovering the town library was like a Mecca, and I walked there every chance I could. Books and books and books and books, all free, all for me. It never occurred to me to ask any of the tight-lipped, hissy librarians to help me.
So I've been reading for a long time. I've been a writer for almost as long. I have two masters degrees in creative writing (one in writing for children and teens), and a masters degree in library science, where I specialized in services for children. I was exposed to lots of reading. But here is a confession: I have never read Charlotte's Web.
In fact, I have an aversion to it. I have always been an instinctual sort of reader. If I don't resonate immediately with a book, I put it down. This, I believe, is what happened to me and E.B. White's classic.
Oh, I've read the first couple of chapters. I even somehow know how the book ends. But I always got a cold, displaced feeling when I thought of Charlotte's Web, and I think it's because of all the death in that story. I mean, it's there in the first famous sentence that both children and writers can recite automatically: "Where's Papa going with that ax?" This farmer was going to kill a newborn pig because it was small? Why on earth would I want to keep reading? I wanted books where the main character lives, where there was order and rules and love and happiness, not spiders spinning messages about death and destruction.
I acknowledge that I'm weird. I also acknowledge that I'm a picky reader. Somehow, in spite of all my education, many children's classic novels have passed me by. Even with all my time in libraries and even with all my degrees in literature and writing.
So this next year is my experiment. I'm going to read those titles that are considered classics for children, and I'm going to write about my reactions here. I hope to stimulate lively discussion. And please remember, I am weird. I am an exception to the norm.
Here I go, Charlotte's Web in hand.
