The Importance of Books
Book have been a part of my life since the beginning. My mother once told me her and our neighbor would sit together and read to me and the other woman’s baby, who was later to become my childhood best friend. I didn’t start reading Wharton and Steinbeck until much later, but we have to start somewhere.
Before knowing how to read, my mother and father would read to me a book from my endless number of “The Bearnstein Bears” books. Every book had a lesson. I think that having been read to every night and being explained some of the words and their techniques of why they are the way they are, helped plow my way in favor of learning to reading in school. When it came to reading “Look at Spot” and those other memorable 2-3 worded pages that made up a story, I was always ahead and frequently help my teacher with her work rather then practicing reading with the rest of my class. Now being read to before bed time became reading to me mother and father. My most sentimental memory of being read to be when my father went overseas to be in Desert Storm, he recording himself reading a countless number of books so he could still read to me even though he was a lot of miles away.
