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Born in 1961, my family didn’t own a TV until 1974

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Born in 1961, my family didn’t own a TV until 1974

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We were a reading family--we were sang to and read to every night before bed. In fact, in my New Jersey school, there was no cafeteria, so students went home for lunch. My mother read from chapter books during lunch for as long as I can remember, because my younger brother was dyslexic. We went to the library every Saturday morning, and we voted on the book my mom would read that week, then we each checked out 7 books of interest to us (of course, we shared at home, too). When we went on driving vacations, my mother read to us in the car. So my childhood was centered around reading. She read all the children’s classics (Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, Wind in the Willows, the Narnia books, the Little Women books, Baby Sharp Ears--which, incidentally, I couldn’t remember the name and I told my teacher my mom had read us Moby Dick over the summer between 4th and 5th grade! She even read us some of her favorites The Bobbsey Twins, The Girl of the Limberlost, Freckles). I was a mediocre student but a good reader and I adored books!

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Moving frequently , I attended three high schools

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Moving frequently , I attended three high schools

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I read the required typical classics (Knowles’ A Separate Peace, Melville’s Billy Budd, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Rand’s Anthem, Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Homer’s The Iliad, Beowulf, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Alger’s Ragged Dick, Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, etc.), but also enjoyed reading for pleasure. Even after my folks bought our small black & white TV, we were restricted to the amount  we could watch, so we still read a lot. My favorite books I read by myself as a kid were Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, E.B. White’s Trumpet of the Swan and Jane Langton’s The Diamond in the Window. As a young teen, it was Julie Andrew’s Mandy and Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs. As an older teen, it was Jane Austen’s Emma and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  Because of living in Sudbury, MA, we also read a lot of New England books, like Thoreau’s Walden, Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables, Miller’s The Crucible, Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the poems of Longfellow, and the tales and poems of Edgar Allen Poe. My sister, as a teenager, was an avid reader of Ayn Rand and actually became an “Objectivist,” so at her behest, I read The Virtue of Selfishness, Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I was absolutely against that philosophy--I hated those books but didn’t have the guts to defend my views, to my very logical, outspoken, atheist sister. She is one of Rand’s biggest fans (even to this day!). I suppose I would say I enjoyed childhood fantasy, and because I was adopted, some of my favorite stories had to do with orphans. I adored the book and movie Oliver, which is when I decided my real parents were actually Rita Hayworth and William Holden (since they’re beautiful, of course! ) and they would come rescue me away from these ordinary people.  :)

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Attended my first two years of college at a women’s school (Stephens, in Columbia, MO)

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Attended my first two years of college at a women’s school (Stephens, in Columbia, MO)

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There was much feminist reading to do: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Walker’s The Color Purple, Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Sophocles Antigone, Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, and Plath’s The Bell Jar (among others). In transferring to the University of Texas at Austin, one of my favorite classes was a sociology class called “Race Relations,” and I read most of the African and African-American authors (Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Malcolm X, James Baldwin,  Richard Wright, Frederick Dougass, Carter Woodson, and Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, etc.)

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As an adult, I still love to read when I find time

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As an adult, I still love to read when I find time

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Of course, now I'll MAKE time! I loved Christina Baker Kline's Orphan Train, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. I have loved reading YA fiction over the years as a n adult, like the Harry Potter series, the Divergent series and the Hunger Games series. And I loved taking the SHSU class in that we we’re reading great books, from picture books to YA fiction. As a classroom teacher, I seemed to only have spare time on holiday breaks or summer, but as a school librarian, the opportunity to devour books will be priority.