I started reading spontaneously one day when I was three, so the family lore goes. I asked my mother what the truck next to us said when we were out driving and she asked me which truck to which I promptly replied "Georgia Peachtree Windows and Doors."
Mom was so startled by this that once we got home, she pulled out a book that they hadn't yet read to me and asked me to read it out loud. And then she promptly called my father and told him that he had to stop bringing newspapers home because I was three and could read.
Small note about this story, I could read yes, but I hadn't gotten to the point where I really knew my alphabet? So I knew cat as "cat" and not as "c-a-t spells cat." This was an interesting problem to solve for when I actually hit kindergarten already reading on a third grade level, but with no knowledge about spelling and the alphabet.
But yes, my bookish childhood had several very happy memories - my parents loved reading to us and I credit them with inspiring my lifelong love of the written word. My life would be much poorer without it.
So the top five that I can give you right off the top of my head for my favorite childhood book memories:
1. I finished the first readthrough of the Narnia series at age 4 and I continually go back to reread them and they've given me a lifelong love of dark closets and the persistent idea of falling through to the fantastical from the mundane. Something that has affected how and what I write, I know.
2. Fourth grade recitations of Hamlet's Soliloquy on the playground at Wilder Elementary in Louisville. I was still a very tiny matchstick of a person but the words just sparked this wild thing in me and I was devouring the unabridged plays like no one's business.
3. Listening to my mother read the Fellowship of the Rings to us out loud. A memory I love now, but back then it drove me crazy that we couldn't read through the night. The anticipation was killing me. I'd already fallen in love with the Hobbit and everything about that book.
4. Enjoying the fact that someone had left the unabridged still in lyric form leather bound copy of the Odyssey on the children's shelf so that meant I was allowed to pick it up and read it. Wide -eyed and completely glued to the page, even as I'm hiding as I do it since I pretty much knew that I wasn't really allowed to read these without permission, but it HAD been left on my shelf so...
5. First time reading the Hound of the Baskervilles. I was 8 years old, it was midnight, I was reading under my covers with a flashlight because it was a schoolnight but I didn't care because I had to KNOW what happened next. Just as I get to the really good parts...the neighbor's dog howled and I have never been so terrified before. I'm amazed I didn't wake my sister up.
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