Is It Ever Okay to "Give Up" on Reading?

My mother loved to read. I went through a phase as a kid when I wasn't so much into books, and it was agony to her. But I came around, and now curling up with a book, even if it's a serious special-needs parenting book instead of a best-seller or sentimental memoir, is one of my favorite things in the world to do.

My father, on the other hand, was not a big reader. He had a mystery magazine he liked to peruse sometimes, but other than that, it just wasn't his thing. My husband usually has a few suspense novels piled up to read, but they generally stay piled for a long time before he gets to them. Good, hard-working family men, both of them, full of love and devotion to their families, but not to books.

That's not unusual, is it? There are book people, and there are people who aren't book people. There are people for whom reading is a passion, and people for whom reading is a means to a specific end, like getting the sports scores or doing a crossword puzzle.

When kids are in school, there's really no way around reading. It's a major part of schoolwork, and as parents we go to lengths to instill a love for it, with reading routines and reading goals and reading clubs -- maybe because we want to share our reading joy, or maybe because we'd like our kids to like something they're going to have to spend most of the day most of the year doing.

My son enjoys reading well enough, particularly if it's one of the three books in the Shiloh series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor; he reads those works over and over, and occasionally allows me to insert something new into his repertoire. There's a book lover in him somewhere, I think, and I'm still working on bringing him out.

With my daughter, though ... I wonder when it's time to admit that a loved person is not a book-loving person, and let it go at that. I've forced her to leisure-read summer after summer, tried fiction and nonfiction, easy and age-appropriate, TV-tied-in and movie-motivated, on the page and in the ear, and nothing's really clicked. She claims to love Chicken Soup books, but they're at most a momentary diversion for her, like my dad's Ellery Queen magazines.

This summer, she has a book to read for school, Willa Cather's O Pioneers, and by the looks of it that slim volume's going to use up a lot of summer reading time. Beyond that, I've been thinking I might let her off the reading hook. She's eighteen years old, soon to be a junior in high school, and she's probably been telling me how much she hates reading for more than a decade now.

It's not the end of the world, is it, if that's truly true? One of my worst nightmares is being stuck somewhere without a book. If being stuck somewhere with a book is hers, maybe that's a cue to lighten up already, Mom. Have you thrown in the towel on reading? When did you know it was time? Share your thoughts in the comments.