This is an open forum to discuss which book first got you hooked on reading and to invite you to sign up to write a diary for this series. Do you remember the title and author of that first book? Do you remember how old you were, and whether it was a book assigned by your teacher, or a book you read for pleasure?
As far as I can remember, I was seven when I first read for pleasure, and the book was Alcott’s Little Women. There were words in it that were unfamiliar to me at the time but that didn’t bother me: as the years went by and I reread the book, all became clear.
Between my eighth and eleventh birthdays I lived in a country that barely had electricity, let alone television. We did have the radio, which our British friends referred to as “the wireless.” One or two programs were in English, most in Malay and Chinese, and broadcast time was only a few hours a day. I remember my mother writing to her sister back home: “I can’t wait to get back to the States, where the radio will have programs in English all day long.”
The school I attended operated from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m., except on Tuesdays, when we had a “long day”—until 3 p.m. During the extra two hours we did crafts and played a game called netball. But most days we went home early and during the long, hot Singapore afternoons I read books, stacks and stacks of them: books by Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton and classic children’s books, among them Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Janet Sebring Lowrey’s In the Morning of the World. Encouraged by my father, I even read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
With respect to the sign-up list I have three slots left in July—July 13, July 20, and July 27. The first to request a slot gets his or her choice of dates. Do you feel intimidated by the thought of writing a diary? Please don’t! Three paragraphs will do it, and I have a template that tells you exactly what to put in those three paragraphs. You may sign up through the comments or kosmail me.
So please tell us about the book that got you hooked, and whether it was an adventure story, a mystery, science fiction, or a fairy tale…we’re eager to hear what you have to say.