Mocha With Linda hosts a weekly meme called Flashback Friday. She’ll post a question every Thursday, and then Friday we can link our answers up on her site. You can visit her site for more Flashbacks.

The question for this week is:

Did you like to read when you were a child? What were your favorite genres, books or series? Did you read books because of the author or because of the title/plot? Did you own many books? Did your school distribute the Scholastic book orders (or some other type)? Did you visit the library often? Was there a summer reading program when you were young, and did you participate? Do you have any particular memories of your school libraries? What were your favorites and least favorites among the classics (the ones high school English teachers assign!)? If you didn’t like reading, do you like it more today than you did then?

I don’t think it takes too much time around my blog to notice that I am a book lover. I don’t remember if my mom read to me (though she may have), and I don’t remember going to libraries with my mom or entering summer reading programs. My first memories of books are from school. The first book I remember reading parts of there was A Child’s Garden of Verses. I do remember Dr. Suess and Little Golden Books at home as well as a Bible-in-pictures book that I was fascinated with.

I must have had a good many books at home, because one of my fondest memories of my father was when he built me my own bookcase. It was a simple plywood affair painted blue, but I was so pleased that he made it for me and that I had a place for my own books.

The first book I remember checking out of a school library was a book about Martin Luther. I guess I liked biographies even then. I do remember going through a phase of reading about horses, but I don’t think they were the Marguerite Henry books, because they didn’t seem familiar to me when I discovered them later as an adult. I only remember that the name of the horse in one book was Mystery and it was derived from one of the children first suggesting the name “Mr. E,” and when that was rejected, the child ran that name together into the word Mystery. I must’ve run into the Little House books somewhere along the way because I was thrilled when the TV series started and was familiar with the storyline on which many of the episodes were based. I also remember discovering Louisa May Alcott and loving Little Women and its sequels. I loved books that looked like this:

In fact, I bought this copy of Little Women as an adult in a bookstore at the mall (I miss those!!!) out of nostalgia even though I had a copy in a set of Alcott books.

My mom worked off and on, and I remember one baby-sitter as a middle-aged or older lady with what seemed like multitudes of bookshelves, many with children’s books. I don’t remember anything else about the lady or her house, but she was my favorite baby-sitter! I think it was from her house I read a book that I have been trying to remember the title of ever since. It was about a girl from England named Merry who came to the States, and other children made fun of her for using strange words for common things, so she felt left out and unwelcome, but eventually she made friends and taught them how to make primrose chains. Sally suggested one time the book might have been American Haven by Elizabeth Yates, but I bought that one to see, and it wasn’t it, though it was a good book.

I don’t really remember much of anything specific about school libraries through the years.

I do remember the Scholastic book orders and being thrilled to be able to order something from them sometimes. The only one I actually remember is one I got in early high school about a pregnant teen-ager, and I think I only remember it because my dad was angry about it. The story didn’t have much redeeming value — it was mostly about her angst, which was understandable, but offered little hope or direction.

The only classics assigned in high school that I actually remember were a few of Shakespeare’s works, but I didn’t get much out of Shakespeare until I saw some of his plays performed in college. One of my high school teachers must have assigned something from Dickens, though, because I discovered and loved David Copperfield and at some point read Oliver Twist and Great Expectations.I didn’t try A Tale of Two Cities until much later as an adult, and it took me several attempts to actually finish it, but when I did it became one of my all-time favorite novels. My pre-adult reading seems to have been sadly lacking in classics, so I have been on a quest over the last several years to read many of them.

And that’s pretty much all that I can recall about the formation of this reader. Whatever actually spurred my love of reading, I am extremely thankful for it. Reading has been one of my greatest sources of pleasure as well as learning and personal growth throughout my life.