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T he creaky old schoolhouse where I spent my elementary years had a heart that pumped life into the drafty corridors: the library. It was there, at Seattle’s Lake Forest Park School, that I checked out my first chapter book. Scanning the shelves one day when I was in second grade, my eyes fell on the bright-yellow spine of a book called Kid Sister. "Hey," I thought as I pulled the book from its slot, "I have a kid sister." Besides feeling really brave and smart for choosing a fat book with no pictures, I felt the magic of finding a book that spoke directly to me—the wonder of realizing that an author had written about something important to my own life. Not long after that I found a huge volume on astronomy. The librarian smiled as I lugged the big book to the checkout counter in my skinny arms. My dad, the Eagle Scout, had taken me outside one night and pointed toward the starry sky, tracing the constellations of lights that formed Orion, the Big Dipper, and Pleiades. I wanted to know more about the heavens. The humble little school library, I began to see, was a ramp to everything in the world and beyond, everything that could be dreamed and imagined, everything that could be known, everything that could be hoped. Books became balm and refuge. Magic chariot and decoder ring. Periscope and time machine. The days when my paperback orders from Scholastic arrived were better than Christmas. I remember coming home to a locked house one afternoon and losing myself in the crisp new pages of Lad: A Dog as I waited for Mom on the back porch. I remember hiding Island of the Blue Dolphins under my covers and reading to the glow of a flashlight long after my parents thought I was asleep. I remember being gently rebuked by a teacher for devouring my most beloved childhood novel, The Hundred and One Dalmations by Dodie Smith (1956), instead of paying attention to the lesson at hand. I remember lying on my bedroom floor, propped on my elbows for hours, turning page after page of a frayed old copy of Little Women—the same copy my mother had read as a girl. Making eager readers of children is the first step toward making adults who read with skill and with joy, who read for information and for pleasure, who have access to all the wealth that we as a species store in the written word. Researchers are calling for an end to the "reading wars" that divide educators and communities into bitter camps. No single skill defines a reader, they say. No lone strategy works in isolation. By laying down divisive ideologies, we can work together to ensure that young children become strong and successful lifelong readers.
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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