Reading

I managed to read a whole book this break.

I have trouble reading in this house due to frequent interruptions. Emma and Rob are not "readers". In fact, we just recently realized that Emma has a reading disability. So does Rob. (So does my younger sister.) This goes a long way toward explaining why Rob ended up getting his degrees in math, and Emma finds her math homework easier than any other class. Reading a math book is very different from reading the text for a history class. While Emma has been successful so far in school, it was largely because so much of the learning from K-8th grade was project-based. She's really been struggling with the reading for her high school classes. When I realized that she saw 7 pages of reading as a veritable mountain of work, I started asking myself (and her) why? I found a website on dyslexia and had her answer some of the questions they suggested for self-diagnosis.

So, I found an online service that offered audio book versions of the high school text for her AP World History class and the book she was reading for her English Lit class. The first time she used the audio book versions, she was so excited --not only was she able to progress through the reading much faster, but she said that she was able to understand and retain the information so much better than when she read it herself.

Even though you have to pay for a yearly membership to this site (Learning Ally), you also have to send them documentation indicating you've been diagnosed as needing the service.  It was quite interesting when we met with the psychiatrist who will eventually evaluate her test results. He talked to me first, by myself, and asked me questions about Emma; then he brought Emma in and asked her many of the same questions. In some cases, her answers were different from mine, and I realized there are other things she's struggled with that none of us ever realized were problems. He asked her if she had trouble with "over" and "under". She thought for a moment, and then laughed and said to me "You know how you and dad call me your blind girl? Sometimes I look for things in the wrong place when you've told me where it is . . . " It's so funny how you go through life just figuring that everyone experiences things the same way you do, until you find out differently. (This happened to me with my anxiety issues.)

I should have realized that no one is just "not a reader". Emma loved it when I read books to her when she was younger, but she could never disappear into a book when she was doing the reading, and she's never been able to read out loud terribly fluently. Rob has some similar issues. For instance, he finds it much easier to read emails and text that has frequent paragraph breaks. All of these things are clues that there is a reading disability getting in the way.

A few years ago, Rob discovered that he loved listening to the audio book versions of the Inspector Rebus mysteries. He first delved into one simply because the narrator had a Scottish accent, but now he tells me how wonderful it is to experience the books vs. the videos that have been created based on the series --the books are so much more complex, the characters so well-developed. The same thing just recently happened with my sister --she has been listening to audio books as well. I mean, who doesn't like a good story?

So, I managed to read a whole book this break. I might even have time to start another, but I have to wait a bit --this one was so wonderful, and the characters always stay with me for a while. I find myself thinking about them at times, as if they were real people I knew but hadn't seen in a while. Does that happen to anyone else, where you have to let the characters fade before you start a new book?

Elizabeth George and her Inspector Lynley books is one of my favorite authors and series, and I saved this book so I could savor it over break. Now I have a choice of new two sci-fi books on my Kindle: one is the second in a trilogy by Greg Bear (Killing Titan, the War Dogs trilogy), and the other is the next (4th, I think) in the Expanse series. I'm leaning toward the Greg Bear.