The Magic of Reading

One reason I decided to write for children was my lifelong love affair with children’s books. There’s a line in the movie You’ve Got Mail (yes, I have it on DVD—doesn't everyone?) that really rings true for me. Children's bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly describes how she felt as a little girl, watching her mother at work: “It wasn't just that she was selling books, it was that she was helping people become whoever they were going to turn out to be. Because when you read a book as a child, it becomes part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your life does.”

I grew up loving books. For me, there was no feeling more satisfying than coming home from the library with a big stack of books and all the time in the world to read them. Although I also liked to run around outside playing baseball and Kick the Can and Red Rover, Red Rover with the neighborhood kids, there was a side of me that was drawn to the more private thrills of watching a story unfold on a page, moment by moment, scene by scene.

My earliest reading memories involve fairy tales, both the happy kind (Cinderella—how I coveted her floaty blue ballgown!) and the scary kind (The Brothers Grimm—best read on a bright summer afternoon rather than under the covers at night). I was fascinated by these temporary visits to magical worlds, so different from life in peaceful, middle-class suburbia. And if things ever got too dicey, I could always close the book and go back outside for a while.

Like many kids, I was drawn to series books. I think it’s because, once I got to know a character, I liked to stick with him or her through each subsequent adventure. I’m still pretty much like that. When I’m reading I like to feel that I truly know these people, at least for a while. I guess that explains my fondess for seres like The Wizard of Oz, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins and Little House on the Prarie.

This kind of reading had its pitfalls, though, for a reader as sentimental as I was. After all, once Dorothy returns to Kansas, she never reunites with the old gang from Oz again. In These Happy Golden Years, Laura Ingalls moves away from her little house, breaking up the family that had been through so much together. I could get pretty emotional going through these kinds of changes with my beloved characters.

In retrospect, maybe my childhood reading experiences were early lessons in the art of understanding that change is inevitable, and that no matter how tightly you hold on to things, they are already changing. It's a lesson I still struggle with.

More about kids’ books next time…