Books: Why I Will Never Go Completely Digital

If you are a librarian, just stop reading and move on to the next blog. I don't want to be accused of causing panic attacks. And before I continue, let me point out two ironies cuz I just love irony! I was a librarian for 3 years AND I am writing this blog post on my iPod.

I didn't like to read growing up. Until college I didn't know I had a diagnosable reading issue. And the strange part is that it's only in my native language. I have studied 4 languages yet have no problems with them whatsoever. I loved magazines and big photo books like National Geographic and any coffee table book I could get my hands on. I could hold them, gaze upon the colorful photos and actually handle reading the captions. But give me a novel and I was lost.

Then came college where my Elementary Reading instructor, Mary Pirrung, figured out my problem and coached me on some great strategies. All of them required writing or drawing on the pages. Great for books I owned or for copies of pages, but I was a librarian's nightmare. I would bring in onion skin (if you don't know what that is, go to Wikipedia...) and trace over the words and pages with a marking pen. The librarian at my college was also a nun so you can just imagine the uproar I caused!

Well, the techniques worked and by the time I got out of college I was able to modify those tracing techniques. I discovered so many books that had seemed beyond my grasp all that time. Eventually I even dug into trashy historical romances. And now I write them (under a pen name so as to not embarras my sons haha!). I don't write in or underline those, but I do that to all the other books I read. Still have to if I need to grasp and remember the concepts.

I learned that it's the physical manipulation, the total physical response, that helps. So until I can fully mimic that feel with a handheld device, I will need paper and binding and markers and a mechanical pencil. So, if you know someone like me, just keep your library books out of reach and leave us to our funky ways. We get the job done differently but with the same results.

Here's to being differently abled!

Peace,
Shelly

PS Don't be fooled - people with reading disabilities often have high IQs and are extremely creative. We might have been called "dummy" in school, but we're the ones laughing now...