When I was a kid I used to have quite a few books. Of course, they were mostly Little Golden Books. Those books had about 10-20 pages and were filled with mostly pictures. I also had quite a few books that came with records. I even had the record player shown in this cartoon.
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail128.htmlI can't remember too much, but I do think some of my favorite books featured Disney characters. Books like that were more picture driven, so you didn't have to read as much stuff as you would for the Poky Little Puppy. I do remember not being a fan of that puppy because it didn't seem as fun or colorful as a Disney character would. I tended to stay away from more serious books and constantly read and reread comedic, "fun" books.
I did eventually read somewhat bigger books. Around the time we got a casette player, I could read 30-40 page books that were still heavy in pictures but followed a plot of a cartoon feature. Disney's "Mickey and the Beanstalk" comes to mind, as do a couple Winnie the Pooh books. I also had a couple books based on cartoon shows I saw as a kid, like the Get-a-Long Gang and a book based on Pac-Man.
Sadly, my reading of these books never carried in school beyond the third grade. By the time I reached the fourth grade, I was good at grammar and spelling but bad at literature. We only had to do short readings a night, and answer those kind of questions that are basically asking if you read or not, but, I never excelled at this. I would occasionally get Ds for the rest of my time at elementary school. I would often got bored of descriptions of backgrounds and skipped forward to conversations between characters. Eventually by the eighth grade I had figured out the system and was able to get all Bs in my literature classes, but I was just coasting at that poin.
That cost me when I went to high school. Except for one C in history, I got all Bs and As in the eighth grade, and I was punished for it by getting several honors classes in high school. I had a tough time in many classes that freshman year, but I really tanked in English 9. Like I said, I coasted through the eighth grade, so I had the hardest time reading whole chapters of a novel. I was so use to playing as much video games as I wanted so it took me a while to adjust. I received my first F at the end of the first quarter for English.
(The dumbest part was that on the first day, my teacher told us to get a notebook and keep track of everything, including vocabulary words. Somehow, I must have ignored this because I never thought about having a notebook until we had a quiz using all previous vocabulary words. It finally occured to me that I was suppose to be doing a better job as a student, and not just reading a chapter during my study period or lunch.)
At home, I wasn't doing any better. I rarely read novels. I had a few kid novels, but never read too many. One of my earliest (not for kids) novels was based on the first Batman movie. It took me forever to read it, and I remember reading the opening part about Batman's first appearance several times. The author would constantly repeat, "Welcome to Gotham City," and it wouldn't occur to me that he was trying to make some poin. By the end of the novel, I had already forgotten a lot of the stuff that happened.
"Batman stopped some random bad guys, then he killed the Joker somehow. A woman named Vicki Vale appeared at some poin. The end."
The books I ended up reading the most weren't really novels at all. I read the heck out of a book that gave synopses of the first twenty-four Superbowls. I also enjoyed a couple books that talked about various blunders that happened in the NFL and the NBA. A few more "books" were editions of "How To Beat Nintendo Games." They were cool, but not about characters or plots. I mostly stuck to video game magazines, which I was always bugging my parents to get for me.
So basically I ended up hating literature class. I was a much better student in math, and my SAT scores benefitted from my higher math scores. The only novels I liked during high school was The Inferno, which I loved, and Invisble Man, the only book in the ninth grade which led me to high quiz grades.
In college I got around this my only having two english classes, both of which were required. Looking back I wish I had taken a couple more, but at the time I was glad I could avoid such classes.
Anyway, it was a good internet friend of mine that finally got me to read some novels that weren't required by a teacher nor just a book full of video game cheats. I had just read the extremely boring "Fellowship of The Rings," a novel that took me eight months to read. I asked my friend to recommend some books and she emailed me a few. I read many of the books from the two series she recommended to me, and I was even able to catch up to her while she was 20 or so books into one of the series. I started reading more and more novels, including books that made her role her eyes.
So with that, I'll hopefully provide a few thoughts on some of the books I've read. Even if I don't, I'm glad that my reading skills have improved and that I'm still thinking about new series I could start.
Book I'm currently reading - "Now I Can Die In Peace" by Bill Simmons
Last Book Read - "A Hat Full of Sky" by Terry Pratchett
