Early Reading Meme

I swiped this from pages turned.

1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you?

I don't know! I'm told I was 3, but I don't really remember. It's not that I don't trust my mom's words, but I'm really, really not sure. I definitely knew by kindergarten because I remember how excited I was to get to go to the school library. I imagine my parents both taught me and I picked up anything else I needed from "Sesame Street."

2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what’s the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library?

The first books I can remember as mine were the American Girl series (see below) and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. Those butter-yellow books still sit in the bookshelves at home although now the pages are yellow and brittle. I read those over and over -- with the exception of BY THE SHORES OF SILVER LAKE and THE LONG WINTER, because of all the bad stuff that happens in them. (I won't elaborate, in case you still want to get back and read or remind yourself.)

3. What’s the first book that you bought with your own money?

When I was 5 or 6 I got $1 a week for my allowance, and American Girl chapter books (yes, these, although mine were white paperbacks) were $6. To foster Good Spending Habits, I had to save $12 in order to be taken to the much-missed Cedarburg Books and buy one book. Another hard lesson: When the price of those books went up to $7, meaning it now took 14 weeks to earn enough to get a new book. That hurt! Apparently they haven't gone up in price again since then, though.

4. Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you re-read most often?

Oh heck yes. I read ROLLER SKATES by Ruth Sawyer and A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN by Betty Smith over and over. And MATILDA and CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, and Gordon Korman's NO COINS, PLEASE, which permanently shaped my view of the world. Ditto ANNE OF THE ISLAND and the EMILY trilogy by L.M. Montgomery. (ANNE OF THE ISLAND, the third Anne of Green Gables book, was the best because Anne goes off to college and lives with really cool roommates in dodgy boarding houses, plus **spoiler alert** she ends up with Gilbert at the end.) And I had the USBORNE BOOK OF WORLD HISTORY, which I now recognize as a completely Western-centric, sexist, racist book, but it had great drawings in it.

5. What’s the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it?

My parents are going to kill me for admitting this, but here goes anyway. As a kid I can remember very few books that I was actually kept away from, and I started reading "adult" novels probably before any librarian would feel comfortable recommending them to me. (Then again, YA books weren't what they are today.) I remember wanting to read THE FIRST WIVES' CLUB, which all my mom's friends were reading, and having that taken away from me. (But not THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X... even though I never got past the part where he went into prison.) But the best book to read when Mom and Dad were out was P.J. O'Rourke's MODERN MANNERS: AN ETIQUETTE BOOK FOR RUDE PEOPLE. Probably 90 percent of the jokes went over our innocent little heads, but I still remember and quote the page on how to speak Fake French, and I still sometimes look for it in bookstores. At some point my sister and I got caught and the book disappeared -- I never found it in the house again. I think I was 8 or 9 at the time.

6. Are there children’s books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones?

I think I will always be a little sad that Harry Potter Mania didn't hit until I was almost out of middle school. I had to read the books furtively on family vacations instead of devouring them in public noisily. (Exception: last summer's ...HALF-BLOOD PRINCE, which I read on the Chicago El even after a strange man said to me, "You got boobs. You too old for Harry Potter." Sir, I disagree!)