When I was in elementary school, I hated to read. By that I mean I didn't read books for pleasure. Not that I had any difficulty reading or anything. I was just a lazy kid who would rather watch TV or play or stare into space. I guess I hadn't really made it over the hump where the pleasure of reading outweighs the work. This infuriated my mother, who was -- still is -- in love with English, with literature, with books in general. She tried everything she could to get me to read. "The whole family loves books, Evan. Why don't you try this one? I think you might like it, it's about pirates!"
I wasn't falling for it. My whole family loved tons of boring stuff, so that argument wasn't going to work. Instead, I dug my heels in even more. I would never read a book except when I had to for school. Period.
A couple years later while on summer vacation my mom grew so alarmed that I still wasn't reading for pleasure that she decided to pay me to do it. I think the way it really worked was that she stopped giving me a few dollars here and there for spending money on the trip. So if I wanted quarters for video games, to buy candy or whatever other crap I saw and felt I really needed, I had to read to earn it. The going rate was $5 a book.
My sister was furious. She's about six years older and had always read a lot but she never saw a dime for it. She totaled up the books she'd read already on the trip and told my mom that she expected $25. Of course my mom told her to forget it. My sister would read whether she were paid or not, so tough luck! That really drove my sister crazy. She added the injustice to the list of things that she did right and for which she was penalized. That list grew very long over the years; she did basically everything right and my parents rarely appreciated it. Or at least that was her perspective. Mine too, actually. I've never denied it. Being the youngest -- and more of a problem -- I had it much easier.
$5 seemed like good money. But for me at the time, reading a whole book was a huge undertaking. I figured it would take me several days to get through just one, especially since we didn't have any kids books with us so I had to pick from the paperbacks my sister had, which were mostly respectable literature rather than genre fiction.
What happened next is totally characteristic of me, yet it's such a contradiction in my nature that to this day I don't fully understand it. See, as a lazy kid -- not to mention a scheming one, eager to take any shortcut -- I should have picked the shortest easiest books and try to get my money as fast as possible. But for reasons that are still unclear to me, and as part of a pattern that I still often follow today, I did nearly the opposite. For the most part I chose the longest, most difficult ones, and threw in some of the lighter stuff here and there just to make sure I didn't end up completely quarter-less when we came across video games.
My motivation, now that I think about it, was probably pride. Maybe my thought process was something like:
Reading is boring and slow. Not because I'm not smart enough, but because I don't like it. (I'm the smartest person I know after all.) It's reading that's stupid. I could read all of those books if I felt like it. I don't, but I could. I could read the longest, most boring grown-up ones. I could read longer, more boring books than mom and dad, I bet. No kids in my class read those kinds of books. I'll get my five bucks and also prove -- not that I have anything to prove or even care anyway! -- that I'm smart enough to read any of this crap if I want to. Even though I don't. That'll show them!
The three books I remember from that trip were Slaughter House Five (my one token short book), Catch 22 (impressively long and important-seeming, but secretly full of jokes and sex), and Crime and Punishment (this was my reading masterpiece, my tour de force, read as an act of sheer bravado, and the unwitting start to my obsession with Dostoevsky and the rest of the Russians). I don't remember what else I read on that trip, but I do remember that rather than blow all my money on candy and video games as I usually would, I saved about half of it -- it was hard earned after all -- for a set of walkie talkies that I think cost about $20. So it must have been seven or eight books over what I think was a three week vacation, far more than I'd read in the entire previous year.
Back home, out in the summer nighttime air of the suburban street, listening to my friend's inaudible garble over my cool new walkie-talkie, I understood how thoroughly I had triumphed. Sure reading still sucked and all (OK, it was interesting and fun sometimes, but it wasn't exactly cartoons, let's face it). But I was the sort of guy who read important works of literature such as Crime and Punishment and Catch 22. I was on the trail of some deep shit about, you know, existence and stuff. And what's better, I'd made a killing at it.
I believed I had really suckered my mom on this one. And my mom let me believe it.
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