The Books That Changed Me
Back when I was much, much younger, I had a problem with reading. I just couldn’t do it. Well I could, but not well. Now days they would call it a ‘reading comprehension’ problem, but back then they just called it a learning disability. Or they would simply call your kid stupid, or slow. Whatever you called it, the result was the same: I simply couldn’t read well. Amusingly enough it was the oft-mocked “Hooked On Phonics” program that saved me. I’m not sure if I simply needed to learn using a different method than normal, but it worked. Not long after starting to use it, I had no more issues reading. I still didn’t enjoy it, but at least the problems were over.
It wasn’t until middle school though that my true love and appreciate of books developed. I can clearly think back and pick the four books that started it all, and here they are, in no particular order.
1) Moby Dick, Herman Melville: Yes, the famous whale-of-a-tale itself. I picked this book up for one reason, and one reason only: it was worth a ton of points! Back in school we had a contest going, where each book in the library was given a certain point value, 1-100. The closer to 100 the value, the ‘harder’ the book was considered. Moby Dick was the book with the highest point total in the entire school. You had to read the book, then take a test about it. The better you did on the test, the more points you received. Those points were then used at a end-of-year auction to bid on actual items: cd’s, movie tickets, soda, etc etc. Thanks to Moby Dick, I got a fat stack of free movie tickets, and got to read a fantastic book in the process.
2) Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton: Even though I hated reading growing up, I loved dinosaurs, so when a book like Jurassic Park came around and started to get a lot of attention I just had to try it out myself. I loved it. I devoured that book over and over, and I honestly credit it with really getting the ball rolling on my obsession with reading. It was the first time I realized you could just lose yourself in a book, that reading could be fun, not just educational. Funny how it took a story about extinct creatures to make me appreciate books about every other topic in the world.
3) Wizard’s First Rule, Terry Goodkind: The first ‘Fantasy’ book I ever owned. I hear a lot of stories about kids reading Lord of the Rings as their first fantasy, but for me it was Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind. What can I say, I loved that book. Perhaps I was just at an impressionable age, but the story just gave me an excuse to get lost in this make-believe world. I didn’t have to do a book report on it, I wasn’t doing it as homework, it was just fun. As horrible as I think some of the later books in the series turned out, I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the book that kicked it off.
4) Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card: This book was actually assigned reading. I still have trouble believing that… honestly, how often do kids get assigned books that are actually decent? Well not only is this book decent, it is absolutely fantastic. Whoever decided on this being assigned reading for students was a genius, not just because of the quality of the book, but because of the content and the age of the characters. The book is based on, and written from the point of view of children. Brilliant, highly advanced children, but kids nonetheless. What can be better for a kid to read than a story about other kids saving the world? It captured my attention from the start, and now as I approach 30 years old it is still one of my favorite books.
