My childhood in Arlington, Va., a middle class suburb of Washington, was uneventful. Ours was a very intellectual family, and we were encouraged to read at a very early age.
I am positive I was not a neglected child. I remember reading 'The Jungle Book' and 'The Sleeping Beauty.'
Research shows us that children who are read to from a very early age are more likely to begin reading themselves at an early age. They're more likely to excell in school. They're more likely to graduate secondary school and go to college.
My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
My mother had been an English teacher in India before she came to the U.K., and she taught me to read early on - not only in English, but in Hindi, too. My teachers didn't like the fact that I was reading more quickly than they were teaching, and as a consequence, I would sometimes get bored in class.
Two of my three siblings are older, so I suppose I learned from them and became a very avid reader at a young age, which I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature.
I grew up in a place where books were very, very scarce, and I loved to read. I used to read the writing on my breakfast Ovaltine over and over again because it was in front of me, and I couldn't help but read anything that was in front of me.
I'm sure it came as no surprise to my friends and family when I became an illustrator and then a writer because, from about the age of five, I was one of those children who always had his nose in a book.
I don't remember being taught to read, and by the time I was seven years old, I had read a very great many books, good, bad, and indifferent.
There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.
I fell in love with books at the Elizabeth Public Library when I was four.
Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.
I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.
When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.'
I read Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat' when I was 11.
Now if the study of the Scriptures be necessary to our happiness at any time in our life, the sooner we begin to read them, the more we shall be attached to them.
My mother taught me to read before I went to school, so I was pretty bored in school, and I turned into a little terror. You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs.
My childhood was spent in my local library in a San Diego suburb. It's where I became a writer - by 1st becoming a reader!
Sometimes when I sleep at night I think of (Dr. Seuss's) 'Hop on Pop.'
I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.
Probably the most formative experience was reading the 'Foundation' trilogy when I was about twelve years old. That wasn't the first science fiction I had ever read, but it's something that stands out in my memory as having had a big impact on me.
Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.
We never had books in the house. Not any book in our house. Not a Bible, not anything. So, I would go the library from a very young age and get the books out.
Anything that gets children reading is fine.
I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.
