books with cooties

[jazzfish]

Boys don't read Girl Books and other lies my Society Told Me: "My brother read a lot. And as it happens, a fair number of the books he reads either a) are written by women b) have female protagonists, or c) center on 'girl' issues like 'family' and 'relationships.' This fact makes him the Miracle Boy Foretold By the Prophecy."

Confession time: I read Girl Books when I was a kid. I have clear memories of reading a bunch of Baby-Sitters Club books in fifth grade because they were there, and at a book fair one year I picked up a couple of D&D Romance Choose-Your-Own-Adventure things. Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling, about two imaginative girls whose friendship is sorely tested by Growing Up, hit me like a ton of bricks.

I knew there was something vaguely 'wrong' about reading them. I was always worried that someone would make fun of me for it, in a way that was somehow worse than the normal abuse I got for reading, or for reading genre. But I didn't let it stop me.

My choice of reading material may have been the one place in my childhood where I was unquestionably brave. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that books were something my parents didn't ever try to shame me about, or tell me that there was something else I'd like better and shouldn't I be reading that instead. (Tangent: current theory is that books were Play and thus not worth the effort of fighting over; it wasn't until Play started threatening to overshadow Work, in the form of saying I wanted to be a writer, that I got slapped down.)

I always thought I was just a weird kid for doing that. Nice to know I'm not, quite, the only one.

Comments

[jazzfish]

Heh. There... may have been something going on there. Although I'd be more inclined to suspect that it was, mm, something like it not being safe for you to think about people & relationships until you were safely out of your parents' place? and among Blacksburgites?

I don't know that I would have even said "I read this for the characters," I didn't have the self-awareness to think about why I liked some books and not others. (Except for David Eddings, whose snark was hilarious.) I read books *because they were books*.

[rbandrews]

Well, it wasn't just that of course... I got horrible grades in math all through school because they wanted me to "show my work," and I didn't have any "work," I just looked at the problem and saw the answer and wrote it down. I hated having to go back and fake writing down things that weren't the answer.

And then I graduated and that skill is actually really useful now. I can look at a problem and see what the program that solves it would look like, and just need to type it in.

Or, there were a couple times, I overheard some teachers talking about me: "you talk to him and it's like he doesn't hear you, or he doesn't know how to respond."

So I'm pretty convinced that I am somewhere on the spectrum, although (now) the higher-functioning end of it. That may be because of the environment of my parents' house...