I love my husband, and I truly believe he’s the perfect match for me. We feel the same about important stuff – religion, politics, home decorating – and we’re opposite in good ways – he’s neat/I’m a slob, he’s a goofball/I’m a grownup, he’s a good cook/my specialty is Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
All in all, the cosmic fates knew what they were doing when they paired us up.
Except…
I’m an avid reader. My husband isn’t.
He’s not illiterate, mind you. He reads a newspaper or two daily. Trade periodicals for his job. Sports and technology magazines. He spends hours on the internet reading who knows what, and when it comes time to buy a new electronic gadget, he’s a font of information necessary to get the features he wants. So he does read.
He just doesn’t read books.
He generally averages one novel a year, and it’s become a joke between us. The Book of 1995 was Stephen King’s Insomnia read on the trains we took across Europe. The Book of 2004 was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a Christmas gift from my mother. The first of the Harry Potters earned the 1997 title, although I’ve given up on getting him to read the other five so we can discuss them.
My husband’s lack of literary appetite isn’t because he’s not an intelligent Man of the New Millennium. I think he doesn’t read books because:
1) He reads slowly. When we visit a museum, I’m half-a-dozen exhibits ahead of him while he peruses each placard casually. Heaven forbid we are reading something on the same computer screen. I’m itching to scroll on and he’s annoyed that I’ve moved what he’s reading right off the screen
2) He’s easily distracted and not easily impressed. I don’t think there’s a single book he’s not been able to put down. Not much inspires him to keep reading if he’s sleepy/the Buffalo Bills are on TV/we’ve rented a DVD/the gutters need cleaning. I’m sure the last time he stayed up into the wee hours because of a book was during college finals.
3) Neither of his parents are big readers. Unlike mine, his family didn’t make weekly trips to the library. He didn’t see his mother curled up on the couch with a great book, or his father camped out on Sunday with an open book on his lap. He never experienced a peaceful Christmas afternoon with everyone buried nose-deep in their literary presents. A $20 certificate to B&N wasn’t the birthday gift equivalent of pure gold. In short, reading wasn’t important when he was growing up, and it’s not important to him now.
Which goes to prove, parents who read create great readers.
I have visions of family read-alouds when my kids get older. I cannot wait to share the wonders of Harry Potter and J.R.R. Tolkein and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’ll never be the mother who shoos them out of their books and into a beautiful summer day. They usually can’t talk me into buying toys or candy at the store, but I’m a sucker for a cheap paperback. Heck, my own annual expenditure on books probably exceeds the amount I spend on new clothes in a decade.
A huge right of passage for my kids was getting their very own library cards. The proud smile on their faces when they signed their names on the line – the only requirement needed to make the trip – and then received that precious laminated rectangle was pure magic.
I think a love of reading is probably the most precious gift we can give to our kids.
My daughter seems to be like me. She’s already accumulated the entire collection of Junie B. Jones and thus knows the allure of a good series, her bookshelf is overflowing, and she’s reading far above her grade level.
My son, however, is following my husband’s lead. He’d rather play on the computer than curl up on the sofa for a good reading to.
He’s young, though. I’m hoping to convince him Book of the Month rather than Book of the Year is a smart goal. I may even go for Book of the Week.
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I wonder if your husband and mine are long lost brothers?
I also read for the same reasons. I wasn’t allowed a new book until I had cleaned my room or done some other reprehensible task.
I’d love to think it was true, but my girls are 14, 12 and 10, and I don’t see it. The older girls have all the technical skills of good readers, and they’ve been surrounded by both books and readers all their lives. They even like books. They just don’t love reading. It’s a thing they can do, and sometimes like to do – like cooking: just another activity that’s now-and-then fun to do, rather than a habit.
We do still share reading moments – my oldest daughter and I read Harry Potter 6 in parallel the day it was released, and I read it aloud to the younger two later. And my second daughter got madly into the ‘Katy’ books when she was ten and studying the Victorians in school – she practically became Victorian for six months. But I think reading will always be only an occasional pleasure for them.
Certainly with the middle daughter, I think it’s the way her brain is made – I suspect it’s not that interested in stories. She won’t pick up a novel for pleasure – but she’ll beg for a copy of the New Scientist magazine, and then regale everyone with the interesting facts she’s read therein.
My husband is the same way. Like your husband, he reads trade magazines and skims nonfiction, especially if it deals with making cha-ching (money, that is). He too is a slow reader, with a nice case of adult ADD, which makes focusing on fiction extremely difficult. The last novel I can remember him reading was Michael Crichton’s Prey 2 years ago. I, on the other hand, read voraciously and quickly. I can devour a 1300+ page Tom Clancy in a weekend.
Despite his personal lack of interest in novel-reading, we are both committed to helping our infant daughter become an avid reader. We often spend Saturday and Sunday afternoons at Borders, me with a novel, my husband flipping through a stack of financial books, and our 8 month old sitting in her stroller looking at (and not chewing on) her big picture book. Even if she does decide the computer is more interesting, hopefully these family reading times will stick with her as she grows up and she’ll see reading as a pleasure, not something to be avoided.
If your son is young, and just learning to read by himself perhaps the Magic Treehouse books will pique his interest. My son loved it when I read Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl to him when he was five, but told me the books he had to read ‘himself’ were boring. “They have no story, Mom!” he used to complain.
And there aren’t that many chapter books for boys that are interesting and have an actual adventure.
Now my son is ten and I had to buy three copies of the latest Harry Potter so my children and l could read it at the same time.
But it all started with him building his confidence reading alone with the Magic Treehouse books. They have an adventure with real facts, true stuff in each story..and my son loved that.
Hi – great insight! My husband is very much the same – reads slowly, easily distracted from fiction, parents never read.
My favorite book of all time is The Hiding Place – I’ve made it my goal to get him to read that in my lifetime. It’s even NON-fiction.
I tell my husband he married me under false pretenses. When we were dating, I gave him my favorite book–a 1000+ page tome–and he read it.
Now, he reads one or two books a year, and he reads them a page at a time, like it’s medicine. He was recently alone on a trip to Belgium, and his hotel had TV only in French, which he doesn’t speak or understand. He still watched the TV in preference to reading the book he took along with him.
True, his parents weren’t readers, but then neither were mine. I don’t remember ever seeing either of my parents sitting down with a book for themselves. However, there were always books in our house, we read classics together in the evenings, and books were the standard bribe to make me behave while out shopping, and a weekly trip to the library was a ritual treat.
I was worried that my kids would follow my husband’s footsteps rather than mine, but I have hope. Our oldest resisted tooth & nail until she was no longer living with us. Now at 20, she reads a book or two a week in addition to her schoolwork. I’m crossing my fingers that her siblings follow suit.
Ha!
You should be glad.
When both are bookaholics, there is nothing approaching normal life. Books are stacked on stairs, on tables, on the floor, on the fridge, and one’s main pursuit in life – besides more books – is more bookshelves…
I married a non-reader. He’s had a copy of Dean Koontz’s One Door Away From Heaven for months. The only time he does a lot of reading is when he’s traveling or away from home. While he was deployed, for instance, he read several novels, in addition to his car and financial magazines and even recommended one to me.
He also reads when he’s ill. When he was laid up a couple of years ago, he finally made it through the last 3 Clancy novels (which you couldn’t pay me to read), one after the other.
Bless him, though. He noted the latest charge from B&N on the credit card statement and didn’t say a word.
I’m the biblioholic child of a marriage in which this trend of non-reading males seems to have been reversed. My father is the voracious reader. He’s always got a novel going, thrown into the car or occasionally crammed deep down into his back pocket. (He acquired the habit from my grandmother, from whom I inherited all my broken-spined, aging Georgette Heyer novels.) In that marriage, my mother’s the nonreader, who looks at newspapers and magazines, but only picks up maybe one or two books a year. But I always had a sense, growing up, that books were valued and reading was encouraged.
Hmm. . .I’ve always been a voracious reader. But because of early reading difficulties, my husband didn’t like to read until his college years. He’s still a slow reader, but he always has a book going — sometimes fiction, more often a biography or history. Both of our mothers are avid readers. However, four of our five kids HATE to read, despite our reading to them when they were young, despite the example we set. So not only can parents not force their kids to become readers, apparently not even encouragement works if the kid isn’t wired that way.
And I do think a lot of it has to do with that wiring. Very active people might chafe at having to sit still long enough to read a whole book, but magazines, newspapers, short articles are fine. People who have trouble processing aurally wouldn’t even be able to listen to audio books (I can’t — if I can’t see it, I don’t “hear” it).
An interesting sidenote: The one kid, now grown, who does enjoy reading actually had the most difficulty with reading comprehension in school. But his love of the written word actually helped him to overcome the challenge. The “gifted” ones, by contrast, are the most resistent to reading and find it “boring” — and believe me, we tried every kind of book/story imaginable to jumpstart them.
As far as we can see, either it clicks or it doesn’t. It’s the old horse-to-water thing, I guess.
I work in publishing, can get books for free, still spend more on books than on clothes and despite that my boyfriend has four times as many bookshelves in the appartment as me. But the key maybe that many of mine are mass market paperbacks and his are tradepaperback graphic novels. In other words, he started reading things that guys like to read and he started early.
One suggestion I’d make for your son is to check out http://www.guysread.com. Jon Scieszka, author of the very guy friendly Time Warp Trio books, has put together a resource of boys books, things that skew towards young male readers and let them like reading. I read an interview he did on Bookslut a while back (http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_06_005714.php) and it really made a lot of sense to me. Afterall, men and women aren’t built the same and thank God for that.
Ah, this one touches a place in my heart. I come from a mother who LOVES to read & she passed it down to me. My brother is ambivalent when it comes to books and might read a book a decade if it’s something he’s interested in. I remember being 8 and my mom taking me to the library because I was bored & wanted to read something. She introduced me to the world of Betsy, Tacy, and Tib. I read anything I could get my hands on and I look at my brother and wonder where he was spawned.
Getting into the writing/reading community has been a wonder for me because I see there are other readers just like me. Thank you for a great column.
I think it’s important to give your kids the opportunity to become readers by putting books into their hands and reading to them. But let them read what appeals to them. Some people simply aren’t interested in reading stories. My boys both read a lot, but rarely read novels. They prefer to get their storytelling from movies and TV shows. I think the important thing is that they can read what they need to in order to do their jobs, their college assignments, and write their blogs.
And–LOL at Bernita. I can relate!!
Don’t give up on him! My ex- came from a non-reading home and when we started living together I told him that my reading time was sacred — he could read with me or find something else to do when I read. He decided to read. He borrowed my son’s sci and fantasy books (which continued to be his reading of choice over the next 20 years that we were together). Within a year or so he was reading at least one-two books a week and loving it.
When we divorced, he told me something that really touched me: he said that my “forcing” him to read had made all the difference in his life. He was a better person than he would have been had I not opened the world of books for him. And, no, it didn’t make me feel any better at the time, but after 7 years I realize he meant it in the sincere way.