I’ve been a big reader for as long as I’ve been able to read.

My mom tells stories of when I was

still fairly small, in first or second grade, and I would get frustrated with librarians redirecting my
attention to the books on the bottom shelves that were supposed to be more on my level. The only
problem is that my actual reading level was higher than my age and size suggested. She’d often have to
interfere to assure the librarian that, yes, I could manage the book I was asking for help to reach. In
seventh grade my school had Accelerated Reader, a program that was more or less a hurdle to jump for
a student like me. Each nine weeks I’d read a Hardy Boys book a night until I reached the minimum
number of points required and then go back to reading the books I really wanted to read but often
weren’t on the AR reading list. It was around this time that I discovered fantasy and science fiction, the
genres that I would cling to throughout the rest of my school years. I read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s
Game, Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising, and John Christopher’s The Tripods series. I also read J.R.R.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings around this time as well.

Before this time I read whatever caught my interest, often science books and books about
cryptozoology (bigfoot, Loch Ness monster and the like), although I had finished John Crichton’s Jurassic
Park in fifth grade. From the seventh grade on, however, I rarely chose to read a book that wasn’t
science fiction or fantasy. In the ninth grade I even started up a web site to publish science fiction and
fantasy short stories from amateur authors. I continued that site throughout high school and assumed
that writing and fiction would in some way end up being what I did when I grew up. I may not have
become a novelist when I grew up, but for a while I was a professional writer, working as a journalist and
copy editor for daily newspapers before moving into teaching high school literature and writing.

I pretty much quit reading in college. I had too much reading for class and finally had an actual
life to have much time for recreational reading and once I graduated and got a job, I gradually moved
back into nonfiction and more standard fiction, although my book collection still has a decidedly geeky
slant, but I still have to think authors like Orson Scott Card and Susan Cooper for much of the direction
my professional life has taken me. If they had not captured my attention early on and kept me reading, I
may have gone in an entirely different direction when it came time for college and decisions for what I
needed to do for my future. During my middle school and high school years, I read voraciously. I didn’t
have much else to do after school. I lived in a rural area and there were no kids my age to play with
besides my sister anywhere near my parents’ house, so I often spent much of every evening just reading.
Now, with my much busier life and a wife who doesn’t like me to spend a lot of time ignoring her while I
have my nose stuck in a book, I don’t read anywhere near as much and I feel a little bit guilty when I look
at the shelves in my office and see the long row of books still waiting to be read and I know that just a
decade ago, I would have plowed through them in less than a year.

Luckily, my son seems to have inherited my love of books. He’s only two, but his collection of
books already fills a couple of bookshelves and his bed seems to be a magnet for the printed word.
When he wakes up in the morning, he’ll often pull one or (usually) more off the shelf and flip through
them until he decides it’s time to wake us up. We’ll often have to dig his bed out from under the pile of
books before we can put him to bed at night.