{"id":1391,"date":"2017-05-05T06:00:28","date_gmt":"2017-05-05T13:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1391"},"modified":"2017-05-04T18:48:20","modified_gmt":"2017-05-05T01:48:20","slug":"why-i-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2017\/05\/05\/why-i-read\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Read"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my publishers, HarperCollins, is currently celebrating its 200th birthday. \u00a0I\u2019ve been part of the HC program for about thirty years. \u00a0To celebrate, they\u2019re asking their authors to write pieces about why they read. \u00a0Since I have to write a blog post this week anyway, I\u2019m doing another two-fer. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I grew up in Bisbee, Arizona, in the forties and fifties. \u00a0Bisbee is in the southeastern corner of the state on the far side of the Mule Mountains, and it took a very long time for the allure of television to make it over the Mules and down into our community. \u00a0Summer evenings were often spent with our father reading poetry to us aloud out of the Treasury of the Familiar. \u00a0I loved the stories in those poems. \u00a0Horatius at the Bridge, The Wreck of the Hesperis, The Song of the Shirt, It Was Six Men of Industan, I Had But Fifty Cents. \u00a0You\u2019ll be glad to know that threadbare volume remains one of the treasured books in my collection of books.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first book I ever read on my own was called Smokey the Crow. \u00a0I don\u2019t know how it came to be among my family\u2019s books. \u00a0It was green with a black crow embossed on the cover, and it was the story of some farm kids who rescued an injured crow. \u00a0I loved that book. \u00a0Ironically, a few months after I read it, I was on my way to school when a crow dive bombed me and tried to pull the gold barrettes out of my hair. \u00a0A man named Mr. Treseiss came running out of his front yard wielding a rake and chased the crow away. \u00a0I was late to school that day. \u00a0When I told Mrs. Kelly I was late because I\u2019d been chased by a crow, she told me I was a liar. \u00a0Oh, wait, that\u2019s another whole story, but isn\u2019t that what reading is all about\u2014stories?<\/span><\/p>\n

I read because I CAN read! \u00a0And who made that possible? \u00a0Of course, our parents who read to us had a lot to do with it, but so did my teachers at Greenway School\u2014Mrs. Kelly, Mrs. Spangler, Mrs. Gilbert, Mrs. Dye, Miss Stammer, Mrs. Watkins, Mr. Norton, Mrs. Hennessey. \u00a0They taught reading and writing and spelling\u2014all the things I use every day when I do my job of being a writer.<\/span><\/p>\n

I read because I love to read. \u00a0When I was a kid, books carried me out into the world on the far side of the Mule Mountains. \u00a0I never got caught up in the Bobbsey Twins or the Tom Swift books. \u00a0But Nancy Drew? Yup, and I still love little red roadsters. \u00a0The Hardy Boys? Absolutely. \u00a0Cherry Ames? Those, too. \u00a0For a while, because of Cherry Ames, I thought I was going to be a nurse when I grew up. \u00a0The funny thing is, I don\u2019t remember ever seeing any mention of actual blood in any of those books.<\/span><\/p>\n

On summer vacations, books gave me a way to escape the misery of being stuck in the back seat of a moving vehicle with three younger brothers all of whom wanted a seat by a window. \u00a0I could avoid the mayhem by hiding out in the pages of a Walter Farley Black Stallion book, or Frog: The Horse Who Knew No Master; or any a whole passle of Albert Payson Terhune books which were all about people raising prize winning collies on a wonderfully exotic estate always referred to as \u201cthe Place.\u201d \u00a0And once we finally got to the farm in South Dakota, where we went every other year to visit our relatives, I remember hiding out in my grandparents astoundingly hot upstairs bedroom reading the books of Harold Bell Wright. \u00a0Shepherd of the Hills anyone?<\/span><\/p>\n

Eventually I graduated to Zane Grey. \u00a0His books were often set in my home state of Arizona. \u00a0They were Westerns with cowboys and horses and ranches and even the occasional bad word. \u00a0Those problematic words were always designated by a first letter followed by a number of dashes. \u00a0I was smart enough to figure out what the missing letters should be, and reading those books made me feel like a grownup.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even now in my seventies, I still read to escape. \u00a0I enjoy reading other people\u2019s books to dodge the responsibility of writing my own. \u00a0They take me to other places and other worlds. I\u2019ve learned about Roman History through the works of Lindsay Davis. \u00a0Ann B. Ross has introduced me to what life is like in the rarefied world of North Carolina. \u00a0The Martian by Andy Weir didn\u2019t make me want to live on Mars, but it scared the daylights out of me, and I came away from reading the book knowing that days on Mars aren\u2019t days at all; they\u2019re called sols. \u00a0And speaking of scary? \u00a0Take a look at a book called I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes. \u00a0That one’s a doozy.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m finishing writing a book this week. \u00a0The next Beaumont book, Proof of Life, has to be in New York on Monday. \u00a0On Tuesday morning my husband and I head off on a cruise that will take up most of a month. \u00a0I\u2019ll be traveling with my iPad fully loaded with any number of brand new unread books. \u00a0I can hardly wait.<\/span><\/p>\n

Going on vacation AND getting to read? \u00a0What could be better?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my publishers, HarperCollins, is currently celebrating its 200th birthday. \u00a0I\u2019ve been part of the HC program for about thirty years. \u00a0To celebrate, they\u2019re asking their authors to write pieces about why they read. \u00a0Since I have to write a blog post this week anyway, I\u2019m doing another two-fer. \u00a0 I grew up in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,50,146,165],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-j-p-beaumont","category-literacy","category-traveling"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-mr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1391"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1392,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391\/revisions\/1392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}