Your Autobiography as a Reader

How would you characterize your life as a reader?

I asked my students today what memories they had of reading or being read to as a child. Many of them had no specific memories of this. One said she remembered her mother singing to her but not reading to her.

I have lots of memories regarding books. When I was five, I was in the hospital, and my mother brought me a Little Golden Book. It was the story of the Largest Turnip. She read it to me, and when I was older, I read it many times over. Even today, I can still see the picture in my mind--all the village people lined up one behind the other, trying to pull the giant turnip from the ground.

A few years ago, I found a copy of this book at a garage sale. I've since passed it on to some little folks.

When I was nine or ten or thereabouts, I was in the "horse story" and "dog story" phase of my reading life. I can picture the low shelves in the children's section at the Fraser-Hickson Library on Grand Avenue in Montreal, where I spent many happy hours. Jim Kjelgaard's Big Red, Irish Red, and Outlaw Red were among my favourite dog stories. Those books were my friends.

From the same library a few years later, I remember a book with a bright pink cover: Put Your Best Foot Forward. It was a book about how to be a teenaged girl: how to put on lipstick, how to act around boys, how to kiss. I can see the line drawings that were sprinkled throughout the book. I guess I needed some help.

Then for a few years, there was a large Black Hole in my life as a reader. I stopped reading for a few years. Fiction anyway. I thought it didn't have anything to do with me. It was made up stuff that wasn't true.

That wasn't true. One day a friend recommended a book to me. It was by Robertson Davies. The title was Rebel Angels. I saw myself on every page. Every character was me. Every incident was my life. I came back to fiction.

Then in university, I kept putting books on my To Read list and kept telling myself as soon as I was finished reading everything I was supposed to read for my courses, I'd read the things I wanted to read. I think I'm still working on that list!

Now, I'm an eclectic reader. Something here, something there, and I'm talking about my house--there's a book here and a book there--by the bed, on the coffee table, in the kitchen, and yes, next to the throne.

Currently, I'm working on:
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (more on this anon)
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky - it's slow going
Les Dimanches de Julie by Sylvain Trudel (a French-language young adult novel)
Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper
The Christian Faith by Michael Horton
Easy Spanish Reader
PLUS a variety of other language learning books (Spanish, Latin, and French) from which I am working on numerous chapters, exercises, and translations.

What about you? What's your autobiography as a reader? What precious memories do you have about books?