Libraries

What can I say – it's gorgeous! We've hit 50 degrees today, the third nice day in a row. The sun's shining brightly, though we have yet to lose all the snow in our front yard.....the down side to having a house that faces north.....it blocks the winter sun from the front yard! We even ventured out to the car wash with the Jeep yesterday.

I spent a lot of time reading over the weekend, and it made me think of all the time I've spent reading in my lifetime. Mom had taught in a one-room elementary school before she and Dad got married, and she had some of her school books that I loved to play school with. I don't think I was too old before I could make out some of the words and read the stories. I went to school in the era of Dick and Jane.....and Sally. I think we had stories about them for most of our elementary school years. See Spot run – run, Spot, run!

The school libraries were great. Each elementary room had its own library. I loved to get into those books. What I wasn't quite as fond of was the book reports that we were required to write every year. We had to do a certain number of reports – which increased as our grade level increased – and they were divided into categories. I never had a problem with “A” books, they were your run-of-the-mill library books. “B” books weren't too bad – those were the biographies of famous people. Sometimes we called them “Blue Books”, because they all seemed to have the same blue book cover. They were easy to spot! The “C” books were my nemesis. I think they had to be science related. I can't really remember for sure. But they definitely weren't in the category of book that I loved to read. Thank goodness the requirement for the “C” books was a lot less than the others.

Once we got to junior high, we had access to the big library. The bad news was that we had that same library for the final six years of school. A couple of us were pretty sure we'd read nearly every book in that library by the time we graduated. We looked forward to spring when the school would get new library books.

By junior high, we also got more exposure to literary books. Not only did we have the library books to read and report on, there were stories and excerpts in our language books. In eighth grade, our teacher (who was also the school principal) taught using the epic poems. She read them to us – and, bless her, she had a very monotone voice that made a good many of us have to fight off sleep. We had her again in tenth grade. We focused more on British literature – I think that year she read “A Tale Of Two Cities” to us. I also remember reading “Oliver Twist” for a special report for that class....I believe each student had a different book to report on.

Senior year was memorable for some earlier writings than we had explored – Chaucer, Shakespeare, “A Pilgrim's Progress”, “Beowulf”. I didn't get into those as much. The one lit class I took in college encompassed an interesting array of literature, including “Catch-22” as our final read.

Most of my reading now is for pleasure, though I am getting some “edifying” reading in the online classes I've been taking. Sometimes I feel a little guilty that I don't read for intellectual enrichment more, but that feeling usually passes without too much problem - I enjoy being entertained.