I’m still cleaning up the blog, trying to combat link rot. Somehow, I fell into looking at the draft posts. This one is from 2009 and I haven’t the foggiest notion as to why I didn’t publish it.
Today’s prompt is from Barnes & Noble’s Facebook page:
September is National Literacy Month. What book got you hooked on reading?
The first book I remember lighting a real fire was my mother’s old high school literature book. I don’t know exactly how old I was, but I know that we lived in Marietta on Joy Ride Drive (really) and that I got really bored during the summer because trips to the library couldn’t possibly happen often enough. (It was physically impossible for them to happen often enough, without my parents arranging to board me at the library.) I’d long outgrown the “baby books,” as I considered the stuff my mother read to my younger sister, and the only other books that I remember being in the house were a set of World Book encyclopedias my mother’s parents bought for her when she was in high school (so from the late ’50s/early ’60s), Bibles, and maybe some reference books Daddy had about refrigeration, heating, and air conditioning. I think Mom might have been pregnant with my younger brother, which would make it 1973.
I recall Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw,” Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” Crane’s “The Open Boat,” and a few Twain selections. The real magic was that it introduced me to Camelot, Shakespeare, and to poetry. There were certainly parts that I couldn’t fathom, like the selections from Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales (in Middle English—there was probably a translation, too, but I gave up before I got to that).
I haven’t stopped reading since then. I am the only avid reader in my family of origin. However, I started reading and singing to my daughter while I was pregnant with her and kept it up while nursing her and beyond. It worked! My partner and daughter are big readers too, and we swap books and book recommendations back and forth all the time.
