And on a more cheerful---and interactive--note

[asakiyume]

Storm Reyes talks today on StoryCorps about growing up as the hungry daughter of migrant workers, herself working full-time from age eight. She could never have any books; books were too heavy for a family constantly on the move to lug around. Then when she was twelve, the bookmobile came to the fields. . .

"I learned to fight with a knife long before I learned how to ride a bicycle"

when I saw this big vehicle on the side of the road, and it was filled with books, I immediately stepped back. Fortunately when the staff member saw me, kind of waved me in, and said, “These are books, and you can take one home. You have to bring it back in two weeks, but you can take them home and read them.” I’m like, “What’s the catch?” And he explained to me there was no catch. Then he asked me what I was interested in.

And the night before the bookmobile had come, in the camps, there was an elder who was telling us about the day that Mount Rainier blew up, and the devastation from the volcano. So I told the bookmobile person that I was a little nervous about the mountain blowing up. And he said, “You know, the more you know about something, the less you will fear it.”

And then he gave me a book about volcanos.

She also saw a book on dinosaurs, so she took that home, too. "I didn’t just read them, I devoured them. And I came back in two weeks and had more questions. And he gave me more books and that started it. That taught me that hope is not just a word."

Do you have any stories of being liberated by books? I know in the "We Need Diverse Books" campaign, lots of people have stories about the transformative effect of reading a book that featured a person like themselves as a main character, for example. For myself, books just opened up other worlds, made my life of the imagination richer, when I was a child, and as an adult, they've helped me see how much is possible. There are so many more possibilities in life than seems apparent from wherever you're standing. Books help you see farther.

Comments

[littlemoremasks.livejournal.com]

My mother was a reader, her whole side of the family are all readers. When I was little and we all used to spend more time together, I always had a sense of what books were good based on how a given one would travel from hand to hand over the year. As I got a little older I realized that my father didn't like books. Like I'm sure is the case for many eldest boys, I kind of wanted to be as tough as my dad, but to be loved by my mom. In a cruel way, although I didn't understand it's cruelty until much later, I used reading to give me that toughness and feel close to my mother.

Of course it turns at that my dad couldn't read. I mean, you know he could read at a certainly level, but not in any way that would give him pleasure. Moreover he felt as though he couldn't read.

For my own part it was reading that gave me a place to be safe, to explore, to have wonder, and basically to be me when the circumstances of my childhood became difficult, and when I left home. Not only due to the very nature of reading, but in the sense that I felt that as long as I was reading, I was still being one of my family.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Reading the DSM-IV entry about Panic Disorder might have saved me.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

My older nephew has just gotten over the last barrier to reading and into the land where it's fun. It's an amazing thing to see.

[avalonestel.livejournal.com]

Books help me define who I am. I read certain books depending on the frame of mind I'm in, and relating to certain characters helps me figure out where I stand at different stages of my life, and how to deal with/figure out situations I'm in or problems I'm having. Certain books have made me realize and uncover things about myself, about things I do and believe, and how I see the world.

Actually - this is kind of goofy - but just a couple days ago, my friend and I were joking about her being a Ravenclaw, and I said I would probably have been a Ravenclaw, too. And she said that she'd actually always thought of me as a Hufflepuff. I got kind of depressed at this - the Hufflepuffs tend to be considered the "lamer" Hogwarts house. But then she found all these awesome things JKR has put out about Hufflepuffs, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was pretty accurate, but about things I'd always thought I'd needed to change about myself. And all of a sudden, those things didn't seem like weaknesses, but rather manifestations of myself that I should embrace and see as strengths to be used differently (things like not really being a leader, and being seen as cute and sweet rather than as outgoing or brave, the fact that I'm not that brave and am rather demure, being more of a pacifist...things I thought I needed to work on and grow out of). So really, it made me accept myself more, and showed me a new direction of growth.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Oh the liberation of books! I don't have much time, so I will just say that 1) Mary Renault's and Mercedes Lackey's fiction about LGBT people were an effective anti venom to the homophobia my parents tried to teach me and 2) when I hit puberty and my parents doubled down on the "act incorrectly and get sexually assaulted" threats/teachings I read a great deal about sexual assault and self-determination in response, which helped so much.

More later I hope….

[serialbabbler.livejournal.com]

Both of my parents are readers so I grew up with books. (Piles and scads and oceans of books. Also cats. I'm probably lucky the cats didn't cause a bookalanche and crush me to death. The cats liked me. They probably would've felt bad about that. There were so many books that once a friend and I even made forts out of them and had a paperback book fight. Much less cold than snowball fights, but the books hurt more when they hit you...)

There's this bit at the beginning of The Woman in the Wall by Patrice Kindl where the main character is describing her father who is of a "retiring disposition" and somehow managed to misplace himself in the Library of Congress. The first time I read that I thought "Oh, hey, that's my dad!" :D (Fun book, that. My favorite Patrice Kindl.)

Meanwhile I was socially inept for various reasons probably not entirely related to growing up with readers for parents. So books were not only a good fort building material, they also provided me with friends when the cats were feeling anti-social. Which is about as liberated as I'm likely to get in this lifetime. Heh.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Escape was my main impetus toward books, at least my conscious one. I'm told I craved books from the gitgo, and began reading letters at eighteen months, so maybe it's just a Thing.

I loved reading about people not like me.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I didn't feel very comfortable with being a little kid and I wanted to be somewhere else all the time; books took me there. I did think it was unfair that all the really good books had male protagonists, but I had no trouble identifying with them and not the stupid girls.

[seajules]

Both of my parents are avid readers, and we've had walls of books for as long as I can remember. I'm told that when I was an infant in the playpen and got fussy, I could be calmed by pushing the playpen to where I could lay down and stare up at the spines of the books. As an intensely introverted child always ending up the "new kid" thanks to the military, I found books to be undemanding friends that I could take with me. I was in a grade school where the teachers would read to us in addition to assigning us reading, and since it was San Francisco in the '70s, there was a wonderful diversity to the books I heard and read. I learned a lot about different cultures and my own, and I also started writing thanks to my love of reading. I learned the fundamentals and many of the details of my family religion due to reading, but I also learned where and how my religion and its subculture went wrong. I've been learning the wide diversity of the human race, and I've been learning how important it is to embrace universal human rights and social justice. So it's not overstating it to say that books have shaped my life and my soul.

[dudeshoes.livejournal.com]

I got liberated by riveting books about age 10, an escape I still rely on. The early books were Mrs. Piggle Wiggle's Magic, the Narnia books, The Princess and the Goblin, and The Amazing Vacation.