Crazy, crazy week. Classes started up, so I’m commuting to Long Beach once again for evening graduate seminars (I’m taking a semester-long deep dive into feminist approaches to the study of religion, which is my idea of good time. Seriously!). I just learned that I going to go from managing one other developer to a whole gaggle of geeks (or whatever it is that you call a gathering of programmers).
I wanted to throw a question out there. This is inspired by an informal survey conducted by the SF podcast, Escape Pod:
What (or who) inspired you to become a reader?
I’m assuming that most of you consider yourselves readers. You know who you are. I know plenty of literate people who are not readers.
Anyhow, I don’t remember learning to read. I went to kindergarten already reading, and my parents say that I taught myself, though much of what my parents say about certain topics is suspect. But I didn’t become an avid reader until much later.
In the fourth grade, Mrs. Wallace read the Wizard of Oz to us each day after recess. I think she did this to calm us down after recess–no mean task for thirty rowdy inner-city kids. Somehow I discovered that there was an entire series written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by John R. Neill, but our poorly stocked school library had none of them. I began requesting the books through the district bookmobile that came every Wednesday. When I exhausted this series, I began branching out, discovering Tolkien, Stephen R. Donaldson, and many others. One of the great finds of my youth was a box full of my dad’s old SF books: Asimov, Clarke, Silverburg, Moorcock, and more.
I spend a lot of time these days reading, mostly non-fiction books–history, religion, science, culture, politics–but fantasy and science fiction are my first love. I don’t remember much else about Mrs. Wallace, except that when we had to write sentences with spelling words in them, she would let me cram all twenty words into as few sentences as possible, as long as they made sense. My record was one sentence with all twenty words (likely a run-on). Some of my first stories were a string of spelling sentences.
I don’t know if you’re still out there Mrs. Wallace, but thank you. I can’t think of a better gift a teacher can give to a child than a love of reading.
