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I got hit by the bug of reading - not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children's books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor.

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.

We had library books in our house, but not our own. So you had 14 days to read them. There would be eight books a fortnight in our house and I'd read as many of those as I could.

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.

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.

I remember the first book I bought, when I was about 11... Dad said, 'What have you got that for? What are libraries for?'

When I was young, my parents had a library in our living room. I was always free to browse and read.

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.

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.