What Do Mother's Day and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" Have in Common?

As I continue in my brilliantly brilliant plan to overhaul this blog, I seem to have accidentally deleted my original review of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There are probably plenty of reviews of this classic and much-beloved story swirling around the internet, so many that my paltry offering may not be missed. However, it’s important to me to have it mentioned on my blog.

You see, this was one of the first chapter books I read to myself, and it came about in a rather devious parental way:

As long as I can remember I have either loved reading or have longed to know how to read. My preliterate years were spent pretending to read out of my favorite picture books (which I had memorized), and clearly recall that I would stare at the words—strange symbols of black on white, curls and lines and dots that I knew translated into language—and will myself to understand.

Reading was literally a magic skill.

Just as it’s hard to tell the exact moment a stack of kindling becomes fire, it’s hard to tell when I learned to read. But in any case, I did. Finally I was there! I, too, had this magic power!

 

Unfortunately, my power was rather feeble. I had expected to immediately understand everything there was to words, and here I was, six years old and relegated to words of one or two syllables, and sentences of three or four words…and paragraphs longer than one sentence were nonexistent.

I was stuck in Easy Reader limbo, and hated it. I almost—ALMOST—didn’t even like to read.

The only thing that kept me from losing hope altogether was my parents reading to me. Particularly my mom, who home-schooled me, would facilitate my thirst for storytelling and hunger for knowledge by reading aloud to me out of those long books that I couldn’t read myself.

I’m ashamed to admit that I got a little lazy. As my reading ability grew, I figured “Why should I read when Mom can do it so much faster [no more sounding out harder words] and besides she can do the voices and everything!”

My mom figured this out, and she also figured out a sneaky, sneaky way of undermining this laziness. She would begin reading a particularly good book (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was one of them)…and then, like a season finale, she would stop at a particularly exciting part, leaving me hanging as to what would happen next!

“Oh, it’s time for me to make lunch” she would say glibly. “I’ll just put this book down right here on the couch…right next to you…with the bookmark where we left off…and walk away...”

(Okay, maybe that second bit of dialogue she didn’t say out loud. But I’m 94% sure she was thinking it!)

Of course as soon as she was out of the room I pounced on that book. It was open and I was reading at breakneck speed. The words I didn’t know I glossed over and figured out later in context.

It was in this way that I finally got poor Charlie Bucket out of his life of starvation, claimed his golden ticket, and sent him off to Willie Wonka’s amazing factory.

This was one of the first books I actually had a synesthetic experience: I read the words describing the candy grass, and I actually tasted it. (To this day I can still remember the taste of those words—though I have yet to find that same flavor of candy in real life.)

Learning to read is an adventure, and then reading itself is an adventure. It expands the world of the reader not only with concepts and language, but sights and sounds and tastes and feelings. 

So if you're reading this, Mom, thanks for sharing the adventure with me. And thanks for the magic.