Re: How do YOU read?
Rosa Graciela Montes (rmontes who-is-at cca.pue.udlap.mx)
Sat, 16 Dec 1995 08:25:23 -0600 (CST)
I was taught to read by my grandmother sometime around the
age of three. Her great love was teaching. She was one of
the "Normalist" teachers who graduated in the early
1900's, taught by American Normalist teachers who went
to Argentina at the turn of the last century to set up
schools for teachers.
There were always books around the house. After
lunch we were supposed to go and take a nap "siesta", which
I hated. My earliest memories of reading were waiting until
my grandmother was asleep and then sneaking out of bed and
over to the bookcase to read. My books were children's
classics in Spanish: fairy tales, the Little Women series,
Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Jules Verne's books.
I don't remember being read to, Eva's message about
early readers struck a chord here. However, I remember being
told a lot of stories. My mother would tell me stories at
lunchtime (so I would eat?) these were retellings of movies
she had seen (my favorite was Sabrina and I fell in love with
Humphrey Bogart just from her telling of the story) and also
Greek tales about Ulysses and the Trojan wars, also the stories
of Shakespeare's plays. At this time I would spend a lot of
my non-reading time acting out the stories I had read and
expanding on them.
All of this was between the time I was 4 and 7. We left
Argentina when I was 7. I left all my books behind. Sometime
around 8 I started reading in English (comic books) and then
went on to British children's books Enid Blyton, school-life
stories, mysteries (at some point I had most of the Nancy Drew
books) and so on. I learnt to read in Spanish but started reading
in English at this point and have preferred English since then.
I find Spanish more plodding, longer words, longer sentences,
a style that doesn't sound like the way people talk (except for
current Latin American authors), the language doesn't allow
me to really get into the story..it's always out there, being
read.
Now for adult reading: I like reading in bed. I do most of my
"work" reading early in the morning. I find that there's a lot
of pressure and, like Jay mentioned, guilt, associated with
this. There's always much more to read than I have read.
And I worry about taking short-cuts and not remembering
things. I do a lot of highlighting and underlining. I
read work stuff when I'm preparing papers or classes.
Otherwise, when I have a particular question in mind,
like right now wondering about anthropologist's use
of narratives in their field-work.
Fun reading, novels and especially mysteries, I
do at night after 7 until I fall asleep.
Sorry for being so long. I enjoyed reading about other's
experiences with reading, especially someone saying
he reads when he HAS TO prepare a paper. The "having
to" feeling is there for me for a lot of the reading
I do, and I always felt unscholarly because of it.
--Rosa
Rosa Graciela Montes
Ciencias del Lenguaje
ICSYH-UAP
Puebla, MEXICO