Ticklish Ears has a post about textbooks both at college and in their homeschool. But what set me onto this post was his taking his daughter off the restrictive readers that came with a curriculum and leading her to the world of biographies.

I went to write a comment, but it turned into a post. So I edited the comment considerably and am doing the posting here.

The biography comment brought up some great memories for me.

When I was in second and third grade my father, who was working about 80 hours a week, would come home to take us to the library. It was my dad, my brother, and me. I would get biographies. My brother would get fiction.

Dad would take us back when we had finished our books. Eventually, meaning really quickly, we were reading our ten books every day. It meant we got to spend time with Dad. Plus it was fun to race each other.

Then Dad was really cruel. I was required to read one fiction book out of every ten and C was required to read one non-fiction book.

I read every biography in the children’s section of that library. And I grew to love Westerns. Both my brother and I are very fast readers and we still read prodigious amounts. (For instance, my brother has read every single science fiction and fantasy novel published by a major publisher and many of the minor ones for the last ten years.)

I read much less non-fiction now, probably only 15 books a year, though I read a lot of nonfiction on the net.

However I still read lots of fiction. (Not as much as my brother. But here is a list of the non-romance books I read last year that I remembered to write down.)

I don’t read biographies as much any more. I haven’t found any engrossing ones recently to get me on the kick again. But I loved them when I was a little girl. I am glad Ticklish Ear’s little one loves them too.