My parents idea of a fun weekend was to take my sister and me to the library every Saturday and to give us money for a treat. So my association with the library was getting a Cherry Coke and a piece of lemon meringue pie. So I would go to the library every Saturday. We had great librarians and there were reading programs so that you would get a prize for reading one of every genre of books. So you could read a biography and a science book and a novel and an historical novel.
And you got a bead or a feather or something, but it was very motivating to me. Plus of course the Cherry Coke and the lemon meringue pie. So I grew up in the public library, that was essentially my living room. At home my parents were great readers, my father read the classics and so we had a collection of all the classics and the summer when I was eight and the summer when I was nine, my assignment for the summer from my father was to read all of the classics.
So I read The Scarlet Letter and The Last of the Mohicans all through, The Deerslayer, all of the American classics. I didn’t really love that. But my mother would read us poetry and she would read us the poems of A.A. Milne who wrote Winnie the Pooh. And Robert Louis Stevenson and Edward Lear, The Owl and the Pussycat. And that I think was more instrumental in my loving to read because I learned to love the sound of the words.
And then I discovered real children’s books, I read series fiction like Nancy Drew and The Bobbsey Twins. You know, commercial fiction. And all I ever wanted, when I was growing up in the library there was a young adult section, which was very new then, young adult wasn’t a real genre it was just being born. And those books had a red stripe on them and they were in a separate section of the library.
And I can remember being ten years old and looking over at that section and thinking one day, one fine day I’m going to be able to go into the red stripe section. The books were very mild, they were like Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen, but to me it represented being a teenager. So I moved, I moved from children’s books to young adult books very early, when I was maybe eleven or twelve.
And then I started reading adult fiction, mostly humor, popular fiction. James Michener, Exodus was my favorite book, Marjorie Morningstar. So I’ve always been a reader. You know I’m here for the, the National Book Festival and they say that Thomas Jefferson said I can’t live without books and I think that’s really, I read everything, I read the toothpaste box you know. I love to read.
And I love to read up and down, I don’t necessarily just read high literature. I love to read magazines, I love magazines. And so reading is just a primary, it’s not even like it’s a hobby or a pleasure it’s just, it’s part of not only every day, part of every hour.