In my opinion the journey into nerdom is different for everyone. Some people are born into nerd families, some discover their nerdiness at school when they learn to read, write and do maths and science, some make friends at school who introduce them to new games, TV shows, movies, books, or music, or, like me, some people have nerd thrown at them from every angle. I was fortunate enough to have two nerd parents, a large stack of nerd friends and nerd teachers.
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| The book that taught me to count |
Both my mother and my father adore reading. From when I was very little our house was full of bookshelves, and now that we have two houses the number of books has only increased. According to my father he would read to me and my sister every day, books like Dr. Seuss, Spot, No Dodos, The Owl and the Pussycat, Beatrix Potter and many others that have long since been forgotten. While my father swears by this, I can only vaguely remember The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham and the Owl and the Pussycat, my memory kicks in around kindergarten when my dad began reading things like The Chronicles of Narnia, Roald Dahl, Beyond the Deepwoods and later the Harry Potter series to us before bed.
When I learnt to read myself it became my parent’s practice to buy me books whenever I asked for them. I asked my father about this this morning and he said something along the lines of ‘we didn’t treat books like toys; we treated them like a necessity of life, like food. Kids don’t need lots of toys but they do need food.’ This custom more or less ceased when we began earning enough pocket money to buy them for ourselves, but that was only a minor hindrance to my book buying. I am proud to say that most of the money I earn goes into buying books or food.
My affinity for reading only grew as I got older and in 2004 it spiked dramatically. In 2001 my parents had split and in 2004 my dad had gotten a new girlfriend who was absolutely lovely, though I couldn’t say the same for her children. In hindsight her kids were probably completely normal children but at the time I thought they were horrid. They were loud, disrespectful and they didn’t read. For obvious reasons we didn’t get on very well (understatement), but we had to spend every weekend and holiday together anyway. As a way of dealing with this I began reading ALL THE TIME. Mainly A Series of Unfortunate Events that I quickly became completely obsessed with. Despite all the problems this part of my life caused I am glad that it gave me the chance to do so much reading.When I started high school I was forced to interact with a large number of new people, most of whom read very little. I took a book to school every day and soon became good friends with the librarians. Some of the kids in my roll call group didn’t understand my behaviour just as much as I didn’t understand theirs, and I ended up in a number of ‘debates’ about why books were important. Sadly I never won any of these fights, but I can’t really say my opponents won either as their main tactic was to repeat the same inane point every time I offered my opinion on why books and the ability to write decent stories were the only reason their beloved TV shows and movies existed.
All through my life I have taken great pride in my reading, to learn, for fun, or for charity, and I can remember one of my proudest moments (probably shared with my father) was in year seven. My dad (who is a teacher) was talking to two of his ex-students who were in my classes and he asked them if they know me. One kid knew me by name but the other kid was stumped until the first kid said ‘yeah, you know her, she’s the one who is ALWAYS reading.’ My dad came home that day beaming, and it’s a story I have never forgotten.
And now for your enjoyment the trailer for Never Let Me Go:
Also, for those of you who are interested, I did the MS Read-a-thon five years in a row, and I highly to anyone who loves reading and wants to decrease worldsuck.
- DFTBA
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