Friday, December 08, 2006

Childhood Reading Meme

This meme was snagged from MissTreeBC over at LiveJournal.

1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you? I was reading by age 3 and I don't remember being *taught* to read. Since my grandmother was our caretaker, I'm sure she's the one who taught me.

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? Hmm... I'm sure that the first books I owned and read were from the Little Golden Library. There's a funny story about my first visits to the public library. I was 5 when Daddy took me to the library and introduced me to the librarian. (I don't remember getting a card, though.) He told the librarian that he didn't want her to censor my reading or steer me to the "children's books". If I took out a book that was too "old" for me, I'd figure it out. So, on a return visit with my grandmother, I picked up a book that I wanted to check out and took it to the librarian. She said I couldn't take it home, and I immediately threw a fit because "my Daddy said I could check out any book I wanted!" She had to call my Daddy on the phone and have *him* explain that no-one was allowed to take home a volume of the encyclopedia.

3. What’s the first book that you bought with your own money? I honestly don't remember. My parents were big on reading and they bought lots of books. But, I lived in a very small town which didn't have a book store. The Bible store carried a few books, but for the most part I read books from the libraries (public and school). I'm trying to remember the first time I stepped into a proper book store and can't remember -- probably some time around the time I was in junior high.

4. Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you re-read most often? I'm sure that I was a re-reader, particularly as a very young child. The Babar books were ones that I never tired of.

5. What’s the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it? Science fiction of some type; probably A. C. Clarke or Robert Heinlein. My mother also read science fiction, so there were lots of books of this genre around from the time I was 12 or so.

6. Are there children’s books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones? Amazingly, I never heard of Winnie the Pooh until I was in high school. But, my friends hadn't been introduced to Babar, so I was one up on them in that case. In college, I took two children's lit courses (Picture Books through early readers; Elementary children's literature) and went crazy reading all the classic children's books that I had not seen as a kid.

Thanks to MissTreeBC for introducing me to this meme; I had a good time thinking back to my earliest memories of reading.