If you don’t like to read …

… you might want to find a different direction for your career. That’s the spot on advice from my friend Karen Commins in her blog post today Reading for success.

Karen is very kind to mention and link to me in that blog post so I thought I’d offer just a small insight into just how right she is that I love to read. When I was in Junior High School I read every book in the school library except the “girls” books, you know, the Nancy Drew and similar books aimed and young female readers. By the time I was in High School my passion for reading had grown even greater, so in those 3 years I read every book in the school library including the “girls” books. The only one I didn’t finish was Webster’s Third Unabridged International Dictionary. I wasn’t allowed to check it out and didn’t have enough hours during the school day to get all the way through it along with everything else I was reading.

How much did I really read? My grandmother was the librarian in the town library in our little village in Minnesota. I read so much that she, as a librarian, actually told my mother (her oldest daughter) that she thought I was reading too much! I didn’t stop me though.

Obviously, you don’t have to love reading quite that much. But Karen is right, to be a successful voice actor you do need to love to read, and especially you have to love to read aloud.