I’m a big reader. Always have been. I’m pretty sure that our fate as readers – either joyful, voracious readers or reluctant ones – is set firmly in childhood. Those who learn to read hungrily as kids will know how to read hungrily forever – they may get too busy to do it right all their lives, but they can always return to such behavior, and I hope they will. Those who don’t learn to really love reading as children are unlikely to ever learn the same abandon in hours (and hours) of reading later. I’m sure there are exceptions (I certainly hope there are exceptions, to that second part of my theory) but I think this is generally true. I am a reader. Husband is not. He reads magazine articles, sometimes. He has read one book that I know of in our years together. But recently we discovered an ability to share an audiobook on a long drive, and I find this lovely. These days he asks for audiobooks when he’s going to fly somewhere for work. I feel so good about helping him find a way to appreciate books.
So the other night I’m on the couch, as usual, and Husband is on the loveseat, as usual, except NOT as usual, I don’t have a book in my lap to defend me from the television. Rather, I have a laptop and I’m researching a few beers that Husband has expressed an interest in: the black IPA (made by 512 brewing, as it turns out) and what I remembered as the Belgian IPA which turns out to be the BPA – Belgian pale ale – made by Ommegang (as I thought). And I look up and see this crazy whatnot that Husband has on the television and I say, what movie is this? and he says, it’s The Bone Collector. I say gasp! that’s a book! it’s a book by Jeffery Deaver.
This reminds me of that other day when I said gasp! oh boy, the Odyssey on audiobook, how wonderful. He said, Space 2001? I said, Homer!
I’ve never read any Deaver, although I certainly know of him (through the library where I work) as a genre author. I know his serial detective is Lincoln Rhyme. But I didn’t know until I caught this movie that he’s quadriplegic! The movie was quite good – I watched a good chunk of the middle part of it. All-star cast includes Denzel Washington (Rhyme himself), Angelina Jolie (of whom Husband is not a fan), Queen Latifah, and Luiz Guzmán, who I like very much. (I always remember him fondly from Punch-Drunk Love.) I think I might pick up one of Deaver’s books one of these days.
But my real point here is that while Husband and I approach books from very different starting points, we both still see books in our lives. (He’s seen a lot more books in his life since his wife became a librarian.) And I think that’s a beautiful thing. Even if my beer research and his television watching made up our route to books on this particular evening, it’s the destination that’s important.
pagesofjulia 
My husband’s not much of a reader either. He reads about one or two books a year, but he enjoys those. And he tends to listen in when I’m reading aloud with my daughter in the evenings.
See, that’s cool, the reading-aloud option. I read him The Old Man and the Sea during a long drive once, and he was more than tolerant. I found another post on this topic here, and there will be more to come here on this blog about our partners’ reading habits. 🙂
I brought books into my life at any early age, and they’ve never let me down. I thought that my children would incorporate reading, since I read to them and they always saw me reading.
Two of my kids are readers; the other two are not.