Discovering Books

I feel that I was born reading. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood, but from a very early age I really preferred the people I met inside the cover of books over the ones I met in real life. When the fictional characters struggled, I struggled along with them.

Very quickly, I developed this powerful reading habit. I carried a book with me all the time. My parents even made deals with me to make me put down my books and talk to my cousins.

In a way it was an odd childhood, but it provided me with a grounding in literature that no university could give me. I’ve never stopped reading. I read two or three books a week.

I also live with a lot of books around me, floor to ceiling. They’re in my closet, in my bedroom. My classroom is filled with thousands of books. I typically spend a lot of time, two or three hours easily, in a library each week. As a child, this was one of the things I looked forward to.

I remember when my mother was about to have a baby, and I was 10 years old. I didn’t have anything to read, so my father dropped me off at the library to exchange the book that was due and pick up a new book. I remember I picked out a book about the life of Leif Ericson. Then [my father] had to take my mother to the hospital.

I had this idea that I would read every book in the library. I started with the biographies. It seemed like a cool idea to read difficult books, like “The Scarlet Letter” [by Nathaniel Hawthorne]. And at the same time, I read children’s books.