Book Lovers

Our little granddaughter lives in a world of books.  Her father is an avid reader.  As is her grandmother.  Her mother's father before her was an avid reader as well.  And his mother, Violet's  great-great-grandmother before him.  Little Violet's room is filled with books and there are plenty more in the playroom.  As soon as she was home from the hospital, story hour preceded bedtime every night, even if sleep preceded the story hour.  It comes as no surprise that she already loves books.

She "reads" one of her favorites

Like her father and grandmother, her nose is often in a book.

At this early age, Violet finds multiple uses for her books.  The board books make quite nice hats, although they won't stay on one's head without a little help.

She's covered in case it rains.

Both of my grown children have been devoted readers all their lives.  I read aloud to them when each was in utero, while breast-feeding, at bedtime, and various times during the day.  I read aloud whatever book or magazine I happened to be reading during the day.  But the bedtime book was always a children's book.  I started buying children's books long before we had children.

As my daughter and son grew into readers themselves we still had story hour in which we read aloud books of their choosing.  Those were very special times and bring fond memories as we read and discussed books.  At age ten, our son chose Animal Farm for our story hour.  I didn't think he would understand the deeper meanings in the book.  To my surprise, he did indeed transfer the actions of the pigs to people and politics.  One of my daughter's choices was The Neverending Story which may have triggered her love of fantasy fiction.  It has brought me great pleasure over the years to see my children read and love the books I read and loved as a child and young woman.

As I mentioned in my previous post, chemotherapy took away my concentration for reading the more complex books I enjoyed before.  But I did not stop reading.  I switched to simpler books that I might otherwise not have tried.  Actually some of them were pretty good.  I read most of the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.  They are typical British mysteries and hit the right combination of good stories combined with less complexity.  They were perfect for my compromised concentration at the time.  While I have always preferred hardcover books over ebooks, I never appreciated my Kindle quite so much until I had chemo.  The books are there, downloaded or in the cloud and it is so light-weight it wasn't a problem to hold during the three to four hours of infusions.  The Kindle also holds poetry collections and short stories and I could switch to them when I tired of my novels.

Ernest Hemingway said, "There is no friend as loyal as a book."  I might take small issue with that.  I would say there are few friends as loyal as a book, but indeed there are some.  And thank goodness for those few.