Becoming an (e)Reader

March 29, 2012

Second post in my Spring Book series. A Spring Reading list of children's books is first. Next up, Sew a Sweater for Your E-Reader.

I am a book lover. Not in the classic definition of a bibliophile - a person who not only loves books but also amasses a large collection. The frugal, simple living, libary loving, use-whatever-community-resource-is-at-your-disposal part of myself has made book buying physically painful for me in the past.

I love the crack of the spine when you open wide a brand new book. I love the smell of paper. I love handmade bookmarks (or recycled envelopes - whatever is handy) tucked in the pages, calling you back. I love making notes in the margin of a favorite reference or inspirational book. Claiming the words as my own.

We've never had a large family library because it doesn't quite jive with our small space living ethic. Yes you can live in small spaces with lots of books, but not lots of books, three kids with lots of creative projects, a cat, and a bunch of outdoor gear. Something's gotta give.

I can count on one hand the hardcopy adult fiction books I own. My Pengiun Classics publication of Anna Karenina I read in my last year of university being one of those. Which I see is available for free on my Kindle. Another book out the door. 

We do own a sufficient, but modest, amount of children's reference and chapter books that I have bought over the years, almost all at discount sales and in used bookstores. 

At any given moment someone in our house has their nose in a book or has headphones on listening to a story. Books are very much a part of our everyday living.

But buying books, even used ones, has not been my norm. For my whole adult life I have been a library user. And since having toddlers, then preschoolers and then school aged children, a heavy library user.

I think there's something to the saying that all you really need to homeschool is love and library card. That is, if you have access to a good library. (If you are one of those lucky ones with good library service in your life - do the happy dance!)

This winter I wrote about my library and book borrowing woes. Two little paragraphs couched in a post that ignited a hailstorm of commenting activity. That flurry of activity prompted me to do further research into our book lending options here and when the dust settled the situation had not improved much.

As it stands we live in a French speaking province (yay for living in another culture), in a beautiful, affordable location (yay for the outdoors) that allows us the freedom to live the life we want (yay for creating the life we want) with a few caveats. One of those being that hardcopy English books, to borrow and return, are hard to obtain. Whether it's the local libary, interlibrary loan or through any other lending service you might imagine. Paperback swap doesn't work in Canada, there is no English bookmobile or other inexpensive mail order services available to me.

Discouraging? A bit. But we live in a different world than the one I grew up in, where the only place to get books was the local bookstore or the library. Heck, we live in a different world than the one my children were born into just one decade ago.

Baby, we live in the information age. And the same thing that allows us to work and live in this beautiful region, allows us to access books - digitally.

Thankfully our personal library and the English selection at the local libary is sufficient for the youngest readers in our house. Call me old fashioned but I want my elementary-aged kids reading real books.

{An aside about Laurent with his iPod. The way Laurent is wired has made learning to read a difficult and slow process for him, unlike his sisters who have learned to read with little difficulty. Though Brienne is taking a longer time to become a confident reader than Celine did. Each child is so unique.

Laurent's reading struggles are deeper and more difficult than I first thought. And because we are working through it and I am wary of labels I haven't blogged about it much. It is a slow and steady progress (yay!) for Laurent and the blessing is that he still loves reading, loves books and feels great about who he is and his gifts and talents. I can't say the same would be true if he was in school. The reality for a boy like him - intelligent, kind, intuitive and artistic - in a public school makes me shudder.

While Laurent's reading level comes up to his "intellectual" level he uses an iPod to listen to those books that are beyond his reading level. This is a great tool and I'm so happy for audio books.}

Celine's reading needs are insatiable and my own (I have less time than Celine does for reading) are simply not met with our small personal library, the village "book room" (a small space in the town hall where people swap books every Wednesday afternoon) or the scant hardcopy library service in the nearby town.

We bought a Kindle for Celine when she was eleven (she's now almost thirteen). The girl always has to have a book on the go, even in the woods. But taking books in your pack is unneccesarily heavy so we bought an e-reader. Celine can now take up to 1,000 books with her on backpacking trips. She's set.

We also bought the Kindle for Celine because we knew were moving to a French speaking province and we weren't sure about the library service. But we knew with an e-reader and the explosion of books available online we could figure something out.

We just had to think out of the box, get creative.

I wasn't ready to commit to an e-reader till I felt I had exhausted my local hardcopy options. I reached that point this winter and I bought my Kindle. I live in Canada but I prefer an Amazon.com Kindle - it's complicated, kind of like our life.

Hardcopy books remain my first love but a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do.

So now I'm a proud Kindle owner and user.

Celine and I use our Kindles for a lot of different reading.

• Free oldies. There are so many books in the public domain and I'm amazed at some of the stuff Celine is reading - it's opened a whole new world to her. It's not always easy, but when our usual channels (of least resistance) are closed to us it often opens up new paths we would have never considered taking. This has happened with discovering and reading classics Celine wouldn't have taken the time to read before, with so much else available to her. The same goes for me. Project Gutenberg is our favorite place to find these titles.
• Short e-books. Like the kind I wrote and other self-help/seize the day/live your dreams (I don't know how to categorize this type of non-fiction.) Some of these are available for free on people's blog or even at Amazon. Otherwise, most of these are fairly inexpensive, and why shouldn't they be, it's not like there's printing and shipping costs.
• PDF's. I don't particularly like using my Kindle to read PDF's - not too easy on the eyes. But I do have my shawl pattern in here and some e-books in PDF form.
• "Regular" book in e-format. These are the books we used to borrow hardcopy at the library. For me this includes mostly non-fiction (cookbooks are my least favorite e-book since I like to make notes and I find electronic note making to be awkward) and of course fiction. Celine reads both fiction and non-fiction e-books also. Some of these are available for free as deals (though you often get what you pay for), some are available through library services that we are able to access out of province (there is no English e-book selection through our library system), and the rest we buy.

I am willing to buy certain hardcopy reference books. I make semi-regular online book orders (my next purchase will include this book on mentoring). But the rest of my reading now is on the Kindle.

our digital "book" drawer

Celine definitely misses unlimited library lending but I know also she's read a lot more classics now that she wouldn't have otherwise read. And these in turn have opened up her world in new and unexpected ways. And with our desire to not accumulate and always need more living space and our intentions to spend greater chunks of time in the outdoors (and not carry books on our backs) e-readers work for us.

I also miss excellent library service and the stacks of books I could access but what it comes down to for me is being creative with our resources.

Recognizing what our values are (lifelong learning) and using the tools at our disposal (the internet and e-readers) to make it work. We call it creative living.

 

I have a couple more bookworm posts coming. A crafty one (sew a sweater for your e-reader) and my personal spring reading list. Hope you're ready to talk books for a bit longer (smile).

If there is enough interest I might make some time to write and publish about how we have a homeschool library in a small space, including the kind of books we own for our children. Please comment if you are interested in something like that.