Word games

My daughter and I have always played word games.

On her recent visit with her husband we played a lot of Quiddler. It's a great card word game and brings out our competitive natures.

The object is simple: You start with 3 cards. You draw and discard trying to make a word. Each card has a different numerical value from 2 pts for As and Es to 15 pts for a QU or 14 for a J or X.

The next hand you get 4 cards, the next 5 up to the last hand when you receive 10 cards. While you can make as many words as you want, we try to get the longest word and out-do each other.

We used to play a lot of Boggle, immediately changing the rules where the shortest word you could do was 4 letters. I have a friend who plays it where the shortest word is 5 letters. Even harder.

Part of the reason I think my daughter and I love word games is that we both love to read. She didn't like reading when she was younger. Since I have always loved reading, I did everything I could encourage her to read including taking her to a bookstore and letting her pick any book she thought she'd like to read.

Those books when she was young were stories about witches in high school. Some of my friends worried that those types of books might not be good for her. But they got her reading.

From there she went to Dean R. Kountz, then Stephen King. Those days are long gone. Now she prefers reading over television. She reads everything but prefers "literary" novels and nonfiction. Even in college with a job and classes, she would read at least one book a week that had nothing to do with her "education."

After college, she got a list from the library of 200 books that every college student should have read and has worked her way through most of those. She reads books that would put me to sleep, books we used to call "deep." I remember one book she was reading that required her to keep a dictionary close at hand. Slow, dry reading.

She told me on this trip that when she starts a book, no matter how difficult or slow it is to read, she has to finish it to see how it ends. She wouldn't dream of skipping to the end.

I had to laugh. Beside my bed were a half dozen books that I had deemed "unfinishable." I had asked myself: Do I care what happens to these characters? The answer was: No. So the books had to go. I don't want to give the time to a book I don't enjoy when there are so many books out there to read.

I realized while we both love words and reading, I demand a lot from a book and don't have the patience to finish one deemed by me to be paced too slow, needs to have started 50 to 100 pages into the story or screams out for something to actually "happen" during the story.

But I am thankful that my daughter loves to read and still reads all of my books and stories as well as books that challenge her.

I still believe that the best thing we can give our kids is a love of reading -- even if she does win most of the word games we play together. :)