I was a delayed reader. It took me a long time to come to reading and to be able to be adept and fluent as a reader. I knew that one should read, I knew that that was a thing that I should be able to do, so I was very good at mimicking reading behaviors.
So I was very good at looking like a person who does read because you know as a little girl in Catholic school I was a rule follower and I knew about following expectations. But what I loved was listening. I loved the stories that were told to me. When I was a kid my parents read to us most nights. They read all of C.S. Lewis, they read all of Tolkien. They read a lot of Dickens to us. We loved Dickens as kids.
And I loved the way that stories would sound. I loved the, I loved the rhythm of language. I loved the shape of words. I loved that as a kid. When I was a little bit older because I was the oldest of five kids, one of my jobs, one of my tasks in the summer was taking everybody to the library. My siblings and, you know, whatever other kids happened to be in the house on that day. And so we’d walk down to the library and the walker library at the time was this weird, I think it was built in the late 70s, this weird, it was made out of concrete and most of the building was subterranean.
So it was this like weird underground world, but I loved being there. And they had this modernist looking research carols, so you’d find your little books and then sit in someplace soft. So I loved books with art. I would go and find books of paintings and just stare at the art for a long time. But what I loved doing was getting books on record. And at the time you could get books on record, you know, a lot of them were produced by the BBC.
They were done as radio plays and they had been released on record and I would bring them home and I had this record player that I bought with my own money at a garage sale. It was made by Fisher Price. And it was cream and orange. And I set it up in my closet, because you know with a big family you don’t have a lot of privacy. So I shared a room, all my siblings shared rooms. And so I would close the closet door and I would listen to books on record.
So I remember listening to a radio play of Treasure Island. And it was completely riveting and I listened to it again and again and again. And then later on when I became a reader I have always been an aural thinker, I think almost exclusively in language and not in pictures. And so as a result the way that a story sounds is kind of central to my relationship with that story.