I'm not your typical 'reader' who sits for hours held captive in the grips of a novel. Those type of people are obvious readers. No, I'm the one in the checkout lineup, reading every word on the magazine covers. In fact I will probably come home and further research a topic that I saw while waiting to pay for my purchases. I have to read all the billboard signs on the highway. I'm most likely to read what's on the cracker box as I am taking it out of the cupboard to serve with the soup I made for lunch. It just seems that words attract me and jump out at me as I walk past them, begging me to utter them aloud instead of muttering the words silently inside.
I guess I come by my wordsmith tendencies honestly. My mother is a prolific reader. I used to send her books in packages for Christmas & her birthday regardless of the insane amount for the cost of postage. Last year for Christmas, I bought her a Kindle from Amazon and she eats up novels every few days. The rest of my family is all different. My husband said that when he met me, and I told him I was a writer, he thought to himself, 'how can I date a writer, I don't even read'. He has changed considerably since then and we even buy him books for presents (although they must be a specific topic). My oldest son is like my mother. He will sit for hours on end and not put down a book until he's finished. When he was 11, we went to a conference and when we were on a break, he insisted on going to the book store. Okay, maybe it was me doing the insisting but he begged me to buy him a series of 10 teen novels. Without hesitation, I bought them, thinking they would last for a very long time. He had them all read in about 6 weeks. That's pretty much all he did until they were completed.
My middle son was more like his dad used to be. He actually hated reading until one day, he discovered that the same events came off the page as what he had viewed in the movie. His grade 6 teacher had read aloud a novel to the class, and every day, my son would come home and recount it to me. Then I bought him his own copy. Luckily, it was one of a series. I kept buying them in sequence and when I heard the squeals of delight when he opened them, I knew we had birthed another reader. My youngest is yet another story. He's highly academic but he is not a reader per se. I suspect he's like me, grabbing words from his environment as he encounters them and processing them as he goes about his day. Maybe like me, he will discover later on that, if ever deprived, he will resort to reading shampoo bottles in the shower.
