When I was young I remember wanting to know how to read. I was only 4.
My town only had a population of about 400 people. We didn’t have an actual library or a bookstore. We took trips to a traveling Book Mobile instead.
At age 5 I fell in love with words and story books. Illustrators painted my childhood. Plump caterpillars, prickly hedgehogs, and sparkling fish.
When I was 7 I started to write my own stories. There were mischievous leprechauns playing pranks on teachers and pumpkins that could talk.
By the time I was 9 I had spent 4 years at Hogwarts.
But it didn’t stop there. I read Magic Treehouse, Ruth Chew, and Gordon Korman. My joy of reading blossomed by being read to by the most wonderful elementary teachers.
In middle school I muddled through everything from the Bible to Machiavelli. I was so eager to know everything there was to know about the world. To understand.
I slept through nearly every high school literature class…but the love for reading was still there.
Gary Paulsen got me through the trials of pregnancy and Lois Lowry helped me cope with the realities of being human.
Brave women authors still guide me through motherhood and parenting.
I truly believe books find you like the lyrics of a song you’ve never heard before. Books help you through your most trying of times.
They’ll lift you up and can just as easily break you.
Leave you wanting more.
They entertain.
Yet the words within the book’s pages will always be there waiting to be read again.
Tabitha Sprunger 