jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
[personal profile] jazzfish
Inspired by a post by [livejournal.com profile] nineweaving sometime last week:

How did y'all learn to read? Did you teach yourselves, or learn in school, or what?

I don't know how I learned to read. My parents (mother?) must have read picture books to me. I know that one day when I was three or four, I picked up Go Dog Go in the store and said "I want this one!" My mother said "Are you going to read it yourself?" Her tone implied that if I said no I wasn't getting the book, so of course I said "Yes." And I took it home and laid down on the floor and read it, and didn't realise what I'd done until I was through.

From there the next things I can recall reading were the Mr Men / Little Miss books, and then a Hardy Boys book (The Mystery of the Chinese Junk) that my great-Aunt Celia sent me, and then some Greek and Norse myths out of a collection on the landing, and then Tolkien, over four or five years and three houses. There must have been other things I read on my own in there, but they didn't really make an impression. I distinctly recall the bookcase on the landing, and I *think* that means it was in the townhouse in Leavenworth (first grade) rather than the house in Fairfax (second thru fourth grades).

And after Tolkien came other brightly-spined Darrell-K-Sweet-covered Del Rey paperbacks, and Pop Shackelford's copy of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, leading in a more or less direct line to the well-adjusted young man I am today.

Date: 2016-08-30 04:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com
I'm another one who doesn't remember not knowing how to read. If you look up "hyperlexia", some of that (not all) describes me when I was very young. According to my parents, I was actually reading before I was fully talking: they were a bit concerned about me not talking, so they took me to a child psychology center at a local college, where I was observed over a period of some weeks. During that time I started talking, and it also came out that I had started reading.

After that, the usual things: The Hobbit at five, The Lord of the Rings read and re-read a bunch of times immediately after....

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"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

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