small, homey scene like in the book, I created a small fire and a lot of trouble.
Once I cracked the reading code, books became as important to me as food: everything by Beverly Cleary, especially. I also loved my Social Studies textbooks and gobbled them up like they were doughnuts.
My reading ventured into galaxies far, far away in middle school. Science fiction by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, and the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien became my new best buddies. I wanted to love horror, too, but Dracula by Bram Stoker scared me so much that I hid it under the bed then spent the rest of the night in abject terror, convinced that Dracula would come to life through the pages and turn me into the undead.
By the time I got to high school, life had become rather painful. Some of the incidents and sorrow of those years I later transmuted into Speak and The Impossible Knife of Memory. I never read any of the assigned books in English class because none of them spoke to my condition. But I kept reading in the sanctuary of the school library. I particularly loved I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg, because it assured me that there were other people out there whose lives were also scary and complicated.
I became a foreign exchange student my senior year in high school, in an effort to run away from home in a safe and practical manner. I wound up living on a pig farm in Denmark and eventually learned Danish well enough to read Scandinavian folktales and sagas.
Back in the States, my family moved to a tiny, rural village. When I got home, I found work on a dairy farm, milking cows before dawn and just after sunset every day. In between milking times, I attended community college where a course in Russian history introduced me to the work of Robert Massie. I also fell in love with the historical novels of Leon Uris. I learned that the best history is found in the smallest details, and that reading while shoveling manure usually leads to disaster of one sort or another.
In my twenties I discovered the power of Toni Morrison when The Bluest Eye ripped open my heart. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale shook me to my core. Anne Rice’s books about vampires did not keep me awake at night, but I loved them all the same.
And then I found my North Star. I read The Watsons Go To Birmingham – 1963, by the incomparable Christopher Paul Curtis and was forever changed, as a reader and as an American.
Researching my Seeds of America trilogy, I’ve befriended vast forests of books about our country’s history. I’ll soon post a complete bibliography on my website, but there are three that deserve to be mentioned here.
by Laurie Halse Anderson
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