I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where, for the first time in my life, I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I discovered reading through libraries. I grew up in a house that wasn't brimming with books.
For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.
Books were the window from which I looked out of a rather meager and decidedly narrow room onto a rich and wonderful universe. I loved the look and feel of books, even the smell... Libraries were treasure houses. I always entered them with a slight thrill of disbelief that all their endless riches were mine for the borrowing.
I was passionate about reading from an early age, and I would always be carrying a different book each week.
Seeing that we were book enthusiasts, my mother began hauling my sister and me down to the Stanton Free Library on Tuesday afternoons, where I'd find two or three books to bring home.
I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn't excite me and didn't even remotely connect to the realities of my life.
Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.
When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.
One of the reasons that I take such joy in being a trustee of the New York Public Library is the love of reading that I found as a child in the Saturday morning library events for preschoolers and first and second graders as I was growing up in Augusta, GA.
My mother brought us to the library every week, and I read a lot. That's what kept me company. I went from school to school, but there was always reading.
No opposing quotes found.