It all started with a dirty dog named Harry. Before I could read myself, I loved hearing stories. Mom always read me a book before I went to bed each night: Mother Goose, Amanda and Oliver Pig, a volume of Sesame Street books that arrived monthly just to name a few. But Harry the Dirty Dog was my favorite. My favorite page was when Harry, now a black dog with white spots, does tricks in an attempt to prove his identity, but the family still doesn’t recognize him. Harry was just the beginning.
Once I was able to read myself, I started reading chapter books. I remember laughing aloud at the antics of Ramona Quimby and Fudge Hatcher. So, while Harry taught me to love stories, Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary taught me to love reading.
Then, Laura Ingalls Wilder turned me into a person who defines herself as a reader. The Little House books were the first books I truly fell in love with and I was hooked for life. I was the teenager whose family had to make pit stops on vacations to buy more books. I was always reading multiple books at once, and with minimal prompting could probably tell you plots of books I read thirty years ago. The majority of my teen reading was teen angst-type novels. I flew through Linda A. Cooney’s Freshman Dorm series faster than she could write them.
My reading shifted in college. With all the required reading, I didn’t have much time for pleasure reading. However, while the quantity decreased, the quality of my reading increased. The girl across the hall freshman year introduced me to Jane Austen and Jane Eyre, my favorite classics. Even if she didn’t turn out to be one of my best friends, she would hold a special spot in my heart just for that. In addition to Austen and the Brontës, I read through a list of classics from the university library. I was now an adult reader.
Once I graduated college and was teaching, I acquainted myself with newer children’s and young adult literature. Everyone was talking about the Harry Potter series, so I decided to read book one with my summer school class. I devoured the next books, then had to wait for the next one to be completed. Later, colleagues were appalled when I described the fantastic new book I had read about children in an arena trying to kill each other called The Hunger Games.
So, I went along for several years, reading popular children’s books and frequenting the local library to find new releases that piqued my interest. Then my friend (the same one who introduced me to Austen and Eyre) changed my life again. She told me she’d signed up to the websites goodreads and paperbackswap. I soon followed. Thanks to goodreads lists I was aware of authors and genres I didn’t even know existed, and thanks to paperbackswap I could get them for the price of postage.
Now I’m in a new phase of reading. The reader/writer phase. You read enough books, and you start to think: how hard could it be to write one? (spoiler: it’s really hard). As I write more myself, I have a whole new appreciation of the authors’ craft as I read. Because no matter how much I enjoy writing, there’s nothing like reading a well written book. If I ever do get published, it’ll be in part thanks to a dog who didn’t want to take a bath.