How I Learned to Read
I’m not actually able to remember how I learned to read – or when. What I do remember is this: the feeling you get when you first find you can read something is great! I imagine it’s something like how you would feel if you had spent day after day staring at a brick wall and then one day found that you could see right through it.
An even bigger factor in the formation of my strange reading/superhero obsession was when I made it to primary school they had one of those people that come around and get you to read them a little something. Based on this, they evaluate your ‘reading age’. When it was discovered that my reading age was twice my actual age that clinched it for me. Surely this was proof of some kind of superhuman power, albeit a strange one. Could I stop an out-of-control locomotive with my head in a book? Leap tall buildings in a single paragraph?
Subsequent to this astounding revelation, my school invited me to research and then ‘publish’ some books for our school library. If I may say so, it was some of my best work. That’s including this essay and all of my university papers.
The more I think about it, the more it seems probable that I learnt to read the old-fashioned way: repetition, repetition, repetition. As in, “Honey, you mustn’t drink that. It’s poisonous. See? Poi-son-ous.” After many repetitions of this speech, or something similar, I believe the first word I learned to read was, in fact, ‘poisonous’. After examining photos from the period, and having pored over in-depth interviews with parties present at the time, I can confidently assume the second one was ‘cakes’, closely followed by ‘pies’. (Now do you see the meticulous research that has gone into this?)
Another important tool in my early reading development was my bath book. These are the books that are made entirely out of plastic, so that a child can play with them in the bath. They usually contained words like ‘duck’, and ‘soap’, with a cartoon-y, descriptive picture. Whoever had this idea was, in my opinion, possessed of an incredible genius, while at the same time tremendously short-sighted. I have yet to find a book for anyone over two that is safe to take into the bath. Now all those who as children had one of those glorious bath books have to work through the conflicting emotions these bath books have created. We yearn to read in the bath, but don’t want to risk damaging our precious books!
Happy Tour - The harrowing tale of what really happened during the Vietnam War.
Oh yes, the path to becoming a good reader is fraught with danger, pitfalls and strange tangents about super heroics and bathing. And yet how rich the rewards! An accomplished reader can read anything they want, and that’s exciting. But, hey, you already know that. I’m sure you have more important things you could be reading than this. Go on then.
So that’s the essay in its entirety. This is also worth a mention...
The Incredible Bathtub/Bookshelf Combo
Honestly, if you're reading more than one book per bath, you're staying in there too long.
I think you will agree that this seems like a pretty cool idea. I’m not a fan of the ‘absent-minded professorial’ style of book-stacking they use here, but I can see what they’re going for.
They’re all like, “yeah, I have a bookshelf in my bathtub, but it’s not a big deal.”
To which I would respond, “But doesn’t the intense humidity in your bathroom when you actually have a bath cause your books to become more wrinkled and soggy than Nan at the beach on a hot day?”
So in reality, this is a bookshelf for people who do not use their bath, for bath haters. For those people, this idea could actually be useful: they could stack up all their reading material there to while away the long minutes on the toilet.
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