In Which It Is Okay That My Dyslexic Has Not Read All the Classics

I am a bookworm. I had read my way through most of the children's section at the library by middle school, and, while I sometimes took to reading rather questionable novels (V.C. Andrews, anyone?) I often picked up classic novels in my teens. I was one of the few people in high school English class who truly enjoyed The Great Gatsby. I went on to read a good deal of Fitzgerald's work. Sometime in about 7th grade, as I remember, I read A Christmas Carol for the first time. I'd seen movie versions, of course, but the book pulled me in, and I actually listed Charles Dickens as my favorite author on some kind of survey I filled out at school. I read my way through much of the work of Dickens, though I must admit I didn't always understand it. I fell in love with Hemingway after reading The Old Man and the Sea for English class and made my way through most of his work in high school as well. I'm not sure how it took me so long, but in college I started on Jane Austen, who introduced me to another side of Britain and cemented my identity as an anglophile.

Despite my occasional forays into questionable literature, I always presumed I would introduce my children to the classics at a young age and they would also devour them. As you may remember if you've read my first post on the subject of books, my children are not exactly bookworms. However, I have reconciled myself to that fact for the most part, and have tried to give Squirrelboy especially (because I still have some hope that Kittygirl will get over her graphic novel phase and pick up a copy of Jane Austen at the least in her teens) exposure to what I learned from the classics in other ways. I handed him a few graphic novel versions of classic novels when I was homeschooling him in middle school. I found others on audio, and surprisingly, he occasionally did too. He actually willingly listened to Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped of his own free will when he was about ten years old. It was so full of Jacobite politics that I barely understood a word, but for some weird reason he ate it up.

He also managed to become an anglophile as I did in early adolescence, first through the British car show Top Gear (to this day he refers to the windscreen instead of the windshield of a car), and later through Downtown Abbey. I introduced him to Agatha Christie a couple years ago and read Murder on the Orient Express to him before taking him to see the latest movie version. Now he's obsessed with Agatha Christie audiobooks and checks them out regularly to listen to on his phone. We went to see the Downtown Abbey movie at the theater tonight, and, as in several movies we've seen together, he managed to lower the median age by at least a decade. He understood and laughed at all the right places, and we both loved the movie. All that while closely analyzing the cinematography, which was apparently perfect.

Despite not being exposed to the classics in the same way I was, my son has managed to grow up with a taste for high culture and for things not of the present moment, while still being very much a 21st century teenager. I only hope I can manage the same for my daughter.