Steven Carr - These Books are for Children

 

 

So, my mama read to me in the womb. By the time, I was in kindergarten, I could read whole words. Whenever I was seven years old, the movie, Matilda, came out. Do y'all remember Matilda? Yes. So, it's about this little girl who did not fit in with her family. Honestly, I could relate. She read so many books that she developed the power to move things with her mind. And so, I spent a lot of time as a seven-year-old staring really hard at things, trying to move things with my mind. Never accomplished that. But I did manage to pop a blood vessel in my eye from bearing down so hard. [audience laughter]

 

Now, it's a good thing that my parents instilled this love for reading in me, because when I was eight years old, my parents got a divorce, and I moved with my mom to Shepherdsville, where I did not have any friends at all, except for one person. And that was my favorite childhood author, Stephen King. [audience laughter] Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “Stephen King is really not appropriate reading for an eight-year-old.” You were absolutely right. But my parents were so enamored with the fact that I love to read, that they basically just gave me any book that I wanted. I remember very specifically, the first Stephen King novel that I ever purchased for a dollar was at the Shepherdsville flea market. It was like one of those holographic copies of the shining paperback. Loved that for me. [audience laughter]

 

So, that was the year that I went into the fourth grade at Robey Elementary, and that was the year that I was also introduced to my worst enemy, the Accelerated Reader program. Do you all know about the Accelerated Reader Program? Let me break it down for you. Each book in the library is assigned a reading level and points. You read the books-- You're only allowed to read the books in your reading level. You take a computer quiz on the book, not on the internet. This is pre-internet. And if you got a 90% or above, you passed the test and you got the points. You had to get so many points per semester. I hated it, because all the books that I, a dark, scary little child, wanted to read were not in that library, okay? “Where was all the pig's blood? Where were the demon possessed cars? Who gave a shit about Charlotte's Web after you've read Misery?” Am I right? [audience laughter]

 

Right? Because, see, even at eight years old, I knew books-- The real world were not those books that they were having me read about rainbows and butterflies and talking pigs and shit. The real world was dark and it was scary. Adults were complicated and they could not be trusted, you see, because a lot of the adult people in my family were addicted to drugs. My grandmother would often have schizophrenic episodes. At the time, I didn't know what that meant. I just knew that they scared me. My mom ended up having an affair with the man who is now my stepfather. And that was the reason why we lived in Shepherdsville in the first place. 

 

So, I knew that the world was not like those books. I wanted to read books that were the world that I lived in. And so, I came up with an idea that I was going to beat the system. I was going to destroy the Accelerated Reader program. And it took me three years. We're talking long game people. Chess, not checkers. [audience laughter]

 

And here's how I did it. I started by taking the test and getting put in my reading level. I would then make sure that all the books that I read were at the very top of that reading level that I was allowed to read at. And then, I would take those tests and of course, I would pass them. [audience laughter] And then, that would bump me up to the next reading level. By the time I entered the seventh grade, 12 going on 13, about to be a teenager, I got to the Bullitt Lick Middle School library. There was only one book standing between me and freedom, between me being able to read whatever the hell I wanted to. It was a 13.1 reading level book and it was Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Y'all, that book was so damn hard to read as a 12-year-old. Let me tell you, I spent days, weeks, probably a whole month going over this book-- I have bought the cliff notes from Winn-Dixie. [audience laughter]

 

Winn-Dixie was a thing. I read the book. I followed along in the cliff notes, y'all, because I was going to beat this, because there was nowhere else to go after Gulliver's Travels. So, I studied, and I studied, and I studied and I finally finished the book. It took me a month. It was probably the longest I'd ever spent reading a book up until that point. I sat down in front of the computer to take the test. I was sweating bullets, y'all. I was thinking, “What if I fail? What if I get trapped in the hellscape that is the Accelerated Reading Program? What if I never escape? What if I disappoint my childhood hero, Stephen King?” [audience laughter] I finally clicked that last question, and I hit send, and I waited for the computer to calculate and eventually, it told me that I got a 93%. [audience cheers and applause]

 

Oh, yes. So, I beat the system. For the rest of my seventh grade year and all of my eighth grade year, I got to read whatever the hell I wanted, because there was nowhere else for me to go. While I looked over at all these kids’ reading their Charlotte's Web and Sherlock Holmes and whatever, I got to read Stephen King. Consequently, that was the same year that I bought from my friend, Kevin, who sat behind me in language arts, his new, pristine hardback copy of Stephen King's new novel, From a Buick 8. And it was the first book that I ever read as a free man. [audience laughter] And to this day, it is still my favorite Stephen King novel. Thank you.