I confess I was the child whose best friend was a book. First it was The Little Engine that Could with its illustrations so beautiful I could eat them. (Yes, they actually made me hungry...) Then it was Alice in Wonderland, read to my sister and me by our mother. While others fell in love with the Jabberwocky, my sister and I were especially fond of the advice given to Alice by the Duchess: "Be what you would seem to be -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."
The first book I (with the help of my sister) read out loud to my mother was James and the Giant Peach. I spent the entire sixth grade bored out of my mind reading books during class. It was then that I read my first science fiction, which was The White Mountains. That book led to Heinlein, Asimov, Ellison, Le Guin, and oh don't get me started...
Every part of my life has been punctuated with reading.
So here we go... the first of what I hope will be many posts about reading.
