I have been a reader for almost as long as I can remember. Even before then, my parents were readers and I remember them reading for themselves and reading to me. My first books were made of a hard cardboard with colorful drawings of kids playing with toys or experiencing various aspects of their lives. I was less than two years old when I remember reading these books. My next memories involving books were getting the Air Sauce and Wind Pudding textbooks in my first grade class. I would sit with my dad in his recliner as he helped me remember the sight words and sound out the phonics words. I loved reading with my dad. I also spent time reading with my mom. My sister and I would pile into my bed and mom would read stories to us some nights. 

My mother also made sure we had plenty of books in the house. She’d take us to the library every couple of weeks where we’d check out an armload of books each. She would find books for my father whose only requests were that we find him thick books, preferable about World War II in the Pacific Theater. That said, he’d read anything, particularly when he was working the night shift at the U.S. Post Office in downtown Oklahoma City and would be awake on his days off while everyone else in the house slept. My mother read as often as she could with me, my sister who was five years younger, and my brother who was seven years younger to care for. I’m not sure what genres she read at this time, but I know she spent a lot of time with her Bible, and that she checked out several books from the library, including those in the Wagon’s West series by Dana Fuller Ross, which both she and my dad enjoyed.

Most of my elementary years are a blur because I spent the majority of my time with my nose in books like Victoria by Barbara Brooks Wallace. I loved the book because I could identify with the timorous protagonist who gravitates towards more extroverted friends who aren’t afraid to face conflict head-on; as a young girl in a blue collar suburban town, I was fascinated by the lives of people my age living in boarding schools: “Timid, eleven-year-old Dylis Rattenbury, afraid to cross the street without holding someone's hand, idolizes bold, free-spirited, indifferent Victoria Corcoran. When both are sent to boarding school, Dylis is miserable at being separated from her parents, while Victoria seems only concerned that boarding school does not provide room service. With their two roommates she forms a secret club, ostensibly to ward off the ‘evil forces’ in the school, but privately to help get herself expelled.” Books served as both a mirror into characters who feared the world the way I did, but also a window into the inner lives of characters who braved the world in a way I thought I never could.

One of those windows was a book I discovered in the library during my sixth grade year called The Girl Who Owned a City by O.T. Nelson. The book is set in a dystopian world where everyone over the age of 12 has died from a mysterious illness. Only children are left. The main character is Lisa, a 10-year-old girl living in a neighborhood in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, with her little brother Todd. In order to take care of her brother in the absence of adults, Lisa has taken driving abandoned cars to houses on the outskirts of town where she raids pantries for necessities. During the course of the story, she partners with other children in her neighborhood to find larger supplies of food and medicine, protect the neighborhood, and find ways to learn how to rebuild civilization. I loved this book so much I checked it out from the library more than 10 times. Finally, the librarian asked me if it was really taking me that long to read the book. I told her I was reading the entire book each time I checked it out because I loved how the main character was so brave and had taken control of her life and survived in spite of seemingly impossible circumstances. The librarian seemed amazed, and she said that if I liked the book that much, she would need to read it. This is the first time that I influenced someone else to read a book, the first time my obsession had impacted someone else, and I wanted to be able to do that again.