Flashback: Books and more books, part 2

While my dad has confessed that he has read maybe one work of fiction in his entire life, my mom was and is an avid reader of fiction.

When I was young, her genre was Christian romances (she has since moved on to science fiction–the epic sorts that are thousands of pages long).

I can’t remember where she kept her novels when I was still in elementary school–it couldn’t have been upstairs because there wasn’t any extra room to be had there. But when the four oldest of us moved to the basement and Mom and Dad moved into the master bedroom, Mom and Dad’s old room became the “school room”–and the home of at least two full-length shelves of Mom’s novels.

Anna and I started reading Mom’s novels by fifth or sixth grade at least. By the time Anna was in her teens, we had developed a rather regular habit of having her read to us–me, her, Joshua, and Daniel all gathered in the boys’ room. Anna started, I think, with one of her favorites–Janette Oke’s Roses for Mama. Once we were done with that, we read A Woman Called Damaris, the other book in the large volume Mom owned. The tradition continued on into our later teenage years. We read dozens of books. The last series we read together like this (I think) was Dee Henderson’s–actually, we might of read all of Dee Henderson this way.

That’s not to say that the only reading we borrowed was what we read together. Anna and I voraciously devoured every book Mom owned–and most of the ones she brought home from the library too. We all of us girls were big readers.

We come by honestly, too, since Mom’s mom was and is a reader too. Mom talks about Grandma’s Readers Digest condensed books–and I can’t forget going to Grandma and Grandpa’s and roving through Grandma’s bookshelves and boxes for something novel to read. Of course, there were always plenty of options.