For the love of reading

My fiancé is not a book lover.  He'd much prefer to use his free time wearing his favorite set of headphones, picking apart various instrument lines and getting lost in the musical landscapes of his most recently bought album, than curled up with a book and lost in a story.  The last novel he read was in college.  As far as non-fiction goes, he's read two books cover to cover since I've known him.

I'm the opposite.  Every night for as far back as I can remember, bedtime was preceded by my mom reading from a book -- frequently a classic that would take several weeks to get through -- to my brother and me.   It was a tradition that we never aged out of -- the books just morphed over the years from Amelia Bedilia to The Wind in the Willows to The Hobbit to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Red Badge of Courage to The Scarlet Letter....  As we read, we would stop and talk about what we were reading -- the themes, the meanings, the metaphors, the characters....   It helped instill a lifelong love of reading in me, and when I was a kid during summer vacation, I would read a book about every day and a half.  Though my pace has dropped off, I'm still always in the middle of at least one book.  I love stories, both reading and telling them.  And I love discussing what I read, so I'm always trying to get my fiancé to read my favorite books so I can talk about them.  I know this is as futile as his efforts to get me to voluntarily listen to a Yes or Neil Diamond album, but I'll still bug him every once in a while to read the suspenseful ones I know he'd love, such as Lord of the Flies or In the Lake of the Woods or 1984 or Something Wicked This Way Comes....

His disinclination to get hooked on written stories made him an ideal person from whom to ask for an opinion about the horror story I'm currently writing.  Was it suspenseful?  Did he care about the characters?  Did he want to read more?  Since it took me a week of asking him to read what I have so far to turn the "sure" into him sitting down on the couch in front of my computer after work one evening with his chips and salsa at the ready, I had no doubt that he would unintentionally be my toughest critic when it came to hooking my audience.

So I'll take it as a good sign that not only did the chips and salsa not get touched once as he read but as soon as he finished, he looked up with big eyes and asked, "What happens next?!," bugged me all night about whether one of the characters survives, threw out story ideas for me throughout the rest of the evening in a desperate attempt to figure out how to let that character live, kept checking in tentatively like a child whose parents are vacillating between taking them to the fair or making them work on their homework to see where my head was about that character's fate, made a rational explanation to me while he made dinner of why it would be a bad idea to kill off the character, and then out of nowhere today texted me from work with "Do I need to start a Save Dave campaign, or are we good?"

Ah, the blissful preoccupation with a fictional character's fate and stressing while at work over that unknown fate....  I'm so glad I'm responsible for introducing this experience to him.  Because there's nothing else quite like that feeling of wanting to jump back into the pages and get whisked away with the characters who only live as you bring them back to life and return them to their paused adventures.  Transforming the world into readers one person at a time -- maybe that can be my superpower one day....

And oh yeah -- I haven't decided on Dave's fate yet....