I decided to participate in Musing Mondays hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading. This weeks topic is "Do the members of your family read? Do you think it was passed down to you? Who do you think influenced you?
Yes, I come from a reading family. My father, while not highly educated, was a very well read man. He loved Egyptology -- he didn't read or tell me stories when I was small, he taught me Egyptian history. I loved mummies! He also loved religion, politics and sci-fi. He taught me that anything you wanted to know was in books.
My mother was a reader. One of my earliest memories was of my mom reading the newspaper and me sitting on the sofa next to her asking what it was like to be able to know what it said. I must have been very young when I asked her that because I knew how to read before I was in kindergarten. As time went on, my mother came to love the library system and by the time my kids were old enough, they made weekly treks to the library bringing home bags of books. She generally got through all of them before the two week due date arrived. My grandmother read so many library books that she had to put her initials in them so she could tell if she had read them and my aunt had a running list, by author, on a little spiral notebook that she carried in her purse.
I have to say that my biggest influence in reading, after my parents, was my cousin, JLSHall. She was my "big sister" and even though we behaved like siblings a lot of the time, I still wanted to do everything she did (still do, really) and I loved her books. As a result, we generally got the same books for Christmas. We would play "school" with me being the student and she being the teacher -- it was only right since she was in school and I wasn't and I really think that she is the one that taught me to read. I don't remember a conscious effort on her part but I think that is how it happened since I could read before I went to school. And, after all these years, I finally got my own copy of "Star Girl".
Reading was important to my husband and me so I made it a big part of raising my kids. We always had books in the house, made trips to the local bookstores, bought books at school book fairs, went to the library, etc. As a result, they are readers as well and both excelled in academics. I hope that they would say that we were an influence on their interest in reading.
