On Reading Matter

We are a reading family, if I confess that Jem at 4 weeks old was issued with his own library card you will understand that I literally mean what I say. Books number in the thousands in our home, every day sees various members holed up with a book, or two. I experience the blessings of this exposure daily; I hear it in the richness of the children’s choice of words, their ability to notice grammatical errors, when introducing a new field of knowledge only to have a voice pipe up, “oh I know, I know, I read about that….’

It brings challenges though too, one is to keep us all in reading matter. We have much of the younger years covered but finding books for Koala has become a challenge. She has moved to the next level, she needs challenging books, enrichment at a deeper level. I have spent time lately scouring highschool reading lists, sifting through, compiling a suitable list. I confess to being rather conservative in my acceptance of what is appropriate for my fifteen year old, I acknowledge that she is no longer a little girl but I still want her to be selective in her reading. After all I’m selective for myself which is why the ratio of adult books in this house is 1 bookcase to 9. And very few are novels.

Rather to my surprise our often disappointing library system had a number of books I requested. Koala has bought home today a stack of challenging novels to read, authors such as PG Wodehouse, Victor Hugo, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Willa Cather and Edgar Allan Poe. This should keep her busy for a week or maybe two. I’m looking forward to re-visiting some of these books myself. I opened up Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ this afternoon and found my favourite line, “To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.”

I’d love suggestions from my readers, the light and the heavy, for Koala and I. Mysteries are our favourites;)