Top Ten Tuesday:

 A Reader’s Manifesto

Today’s top ten Tuesday is more of an invitation to reflect —  Jana asks us why we like to read. 

My answer to this question starts at home. Before my parents had children (myself and my younger sister) they had books (and a dog). I was born into a house of readers and the rest is history. While I'm sure I was encouraged my memory goes back to the first books that I enjoyed - they became the core of my own library.

My earliest reading memories included the fairy tales of Andersen, the Grimm brothers, and others. But central to my reading life was the duo of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass. Encouraged by a father who enjoyed science fiction I soon began to devour that genre while my mother preferred mysteries which I would not immediately enjoy, but have done so more recently.

The home environment was encouraging and my own desire for reading seemed to have no bounds for it included books ranging from history to science to biography in addition to fiction. While amassing my own personal library, my sister and I were regular patrons of the local town library. We enjoyed the walk to and from the library in our home town and would visit the library in our Grandmother's home town each summer when our family visited her.

So once started I can only recall that my love of reading was engendered by the wonder of what the world outside of a small town in rural Wisconsin was like. The histories of Kings and Queens, whether from the Old Testament of the Bible (as in the above scene from the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife) or those of England gave me endless delight. While the stories of heroes and heroines both young and old like Jane Eyre, Robinson Crusoe, Jim Hawkins, Tom Sawyer, and Mowgli, just to name a few, kept me reading into the night. 

An author and reader I discovered more recently, Anna Quindlen, describes my feelings better than I can:

"We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind."