Ever since I was a little kid I have absolutely loved reading. My Mom was a head start teacher and she read to me a lot when I was tiny. I remember wanting to be able to do it myself so I didn’t have to wait for her to decide to read to me. I was determined and I learned to read when I was three and a half. One of my first favorite famous authors was Dr. Seuss or Theodore Geisel.
I read his books over and over again as kids will often do. I read ‘Hop On Pop’ and I gave my Grandpa a nickname that stuck from it because I figured if my Dad was my ‘Pop’ then my Grandpa was my ‘Pop Pop’ so he was Grandpa Pop Pop Bob to everyone in the family after that.
I thought about books constantly and I fell in love with authors and read everything they had written. This is a practice I still continue and I still like to reread the books I like best.
Madeline L’Engle was another one of my first favorite famous authors. She had won a couple of Nobel prizes and since my Mom bought books that had won for me as a matter of course, I ended up with a couple of hers. Her fantasy books changed the way I thought about things and I couldn’t get enough.
Even before I discovered L’Engle I was a huge fan of fairy tales and anything fantastic. Another one of the famous authors I fell in love with was C. S. Lewis. I heard an author interview about his Narnia series and in fact I still reread it today as an adult, probably every other year or so.
I decided pretty early on that I wanted to be a writer myself and I used to get in trouble at school for reading too much when the teacher thought I should be socializing.
My family lived down the street from another famous author, Jim Harrison who has written a bunch of novels and great poetry plus screenplays like ‘Legends of the Fall’. It seemed to me if there was a well known author so close by who I talked to once or twice and later wrote to and he wrote me back, that the concept of becoming a writer wasn’t really such a far away dream.
I was thankful even at a young age to be able to read such wonderful books and to be able to imagine worlds along with these gifted authors. I still haven’t found anything else that compares as far as being an enjoyable experience that is also very educational in that it alters the mind, thoughts and ideas.
