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Anthology

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245 views241 pages

Anthology

Uploaded by

Ricky Favela
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 241

This year marks Scholastic’s 100th anniversary, and how wonderful

it is to celebrate our centennial with a hundred of our authors honoring


the power of reading. A love of reading and a belief in its power lie at the
heart of everything Scholastic does, and together these authors show us
what an essential, affirming, and joyous contribution reading makes in
our lives.
Reading is a way for us to reach out to you, and a way for you to reach
both within yourself and out to the wider world. Reading connects to
everything you experience, everything you dream about, everything you
know, and everything you might not know. When you read, you open up
your heart and mind to words and ideas . . . and your heart and mind
become so much stronger because of that.
Every day, words spread from Scholastic to reach millions of you in
classrooms, at home, and in libraries throughout the world, so that you
can have the moments of understanding, empathy, and community that
stories and information can bring into your life.
I want to thank all the authors here for their contributions, as represen-
tatives of the hundreds of thousands of voices that Scholastic has been
honored to share with the world over the past hundred years. I also want
to thank all the people who’ve worked at Scholastic during this time,
dedicated to making the world a better place through the power of
reading.
Mostly I want to thank you, the reader—because the ultimate power of
reading lives within you. You share this incredible milestone and a shining
moment with our company. Here’s to all the reasons to love reading . . . and
to the power of reading to continue to grow for us all.

—Dick Robinson
Chairman, Scholastic

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7p_100ReasonsToLoveReading.indd 2 28/04/2020 13:01
edited by David Levithan

Scholastic Inc.

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Collection copyright © 2020 by Scholastic Inc.

For copyrights of individual works, please go to page 229.

All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. scholastic and
associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for
author or third-party websites or their content.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in


any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to
Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

ISBN 978-1-338-68170-3

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 21 22 23 24

Printed in the U.S.A. 40


First printing May 2020

Book design by Baily Crawford

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Table of Contents
Editor’s Note by David Levithan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Opening Thought by J.K. Rowling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1. Reading gives you the power to understand by K.A. Applegate . . . . . . . . . . 3


2. Reading shows you how to be gone by Avi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Reading opens your mind by David Baldacci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4. Reading is a purple crayon by Blue Balliett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5. Reading is half the fun by Jim Benton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
6. Reading makes you an interesting person on an interesting journey
by Judy Blundell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
7. Reading works whenever you get to it by Coe Booth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
8. Reading brings sage advice by Ann E. Burg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
9. Reading can introduce you to the people you need in your life
by Kacen Callender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
10. Reading is the magic found by Sharon Cameron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
11. Reading is good trouble by Angela Cervantes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
12. Reading conjures new landscapes by Lucy Christopher . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
13. Reading is your own magic ride by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen . . . . . . 28
14. Reading taps into knowledge by Suzanne Collins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
15. Reading is a shared journey by Bruce Coville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
16. Reading enables you to learn from a world of authors
by Christopher Paul Curtis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
17. Reading comforts and heals by Edwidge Danticat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
18. Reading is good medicine by Sayantani DasGupta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
19. Reading lets you know that you, too, have a story to tell by Lulu Delacre . . 40
20. Reading leads to a world of infinite adventures by Chris D’Lacey . . . . . . . 42
21. Reading shows you the woods and helps you through by Jennifer Donnelly . 44
22. Reading lets you go to places and see things you never would or could
by Jenny Downham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
23. Reading is a beautiful, scientific mystery by Julie Falatko . . . . . . . . . . . 48
24. Reading is a tool of freedom by Sharon G. Flake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
25. Reading gets you into the club by Aimee Friedman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
26. Reading is chocolate by Cornelia Funke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
27. Reading gives you unexpected new friends by Eric Gansworth . . . . . . . . 56
28. Reading works on your mind by Lamar Giles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
29. Reading can give you words to help you know and name yourself
by Alex Gino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
30. Reading builds bridges by Christina Diaz Gonzalez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

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31. Reading takes you and your fears seriously by Alan Gratz . . . . . . . . . . . 64
32. Reading gives you an escape . . . and a home by Melissa Grey . . . . . . . . . 66
33. Reading is of enormous importance by Virginia Hamilton . . . . . . . . . . . 68
34. Reading will keep you company by Karen Hesse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
35. Reading gives you unexpected role models by Tanuja Desai Hidier . . . . . . 72
36. Reading brings families together by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm . . 78
37. Reading helps us realize that everyone’s story matters
by Deborah Hopkinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
38. Reading introduces you to lifelong friends by Alaya Dawn Johnson . . . . . 82
39. Reading can give you the past, present, and future by Varian Johnson . . . . 84
40. Reading changes gravity by Jess Keating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
41. Reading is like dancing with words by Christine Kendall . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
42. Reading is something that can be shared out loud by Kody Keplinger . . . . 89
43. Reading makes you the best kind of snoop by Barbara Kerley . . . . . . . . 91
44. Reading provides a lifeline when everything is different by Sabina Khan . . 93
45. Reading connects us to the world by Kazu Kibuishi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
46. Reading helps people feel by Amy Sarig King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
47. Reading lets you know you’re not the only one by Bill Konigsberg . . . . . . 99
48. Reading gets you through the storm by Gordon Korman . . . . . . . . . . . 101
49. Reading gets you excited to create by Jarrett J. Krosoczka . . . . . . . . . . 103
50. Reading introduces you to the inspiring people by Kirby Larson . . . . . . . 105
51. Reading makes you who you are by Kathryn Lasky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
52. Reading makes us all detectives by Peter Lerangis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
53. Reading is for curious cats by Sarah Darer Littman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
54. Reading gives us courage by Natalie Lloyd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
55. Reading makes you feel seen (without having to explain yourself)
by Tracy Mack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
56. Reading makes you less alone by Carolyn Mackler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
57. Reading can satisfy our curiosity . . . or fire it up by Ann M. Martin . . . . . . 119
58. Reading transports you by Wendy Mass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
59. Reading is like breathing by Patricia C. McKissack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
60. Reading brings you sharks, snakes, and . . . Ramona by Kate Messner . . . . 125
61. Reading gives you comfort by Ellen Miles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
62. Reading can be a shared experience by Sarah Mlynowski . . . . . . . . . . . 129
63. Reading is a story in itself by Jaclyn Moriarty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
64. Reading, like a dog, can bring you great joy by Robert Munsch . . . . . . . 134
65. Reading is an act of faith by Jon J Muth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
66. Reading thrills with the wonder of language by Walter Dean Myers . . . . . 137
67. Reading is for rebels by Jennifer A. Nielsen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

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68. Reading is a magic portal by Garth Nix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
69. Reading may be hard, but it’s worth the trip by Michael Northrop . . . . . . 143
70. Reading takes you deeply into its world by Daniel José Older . . . . . . . . 145
71. Reading is an invitation by Molly Knox Ostertag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
72. Reading can lead you to your dream job by Micol Ostow . . . . . . . . . . . 148
73. Reading is a special superpower by Rodman Philbrick . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
74. Reading is all about love by Dav Pilkey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
75. Reading is a bouquet on paper by Andrea Davis Pinkney . . . . . . . . . . . 154
76. Reading puts a light in your eyes by Sharon Robinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
77. Reading leads to fantastic collaborations by Madelyn Rosenberg
and Wendy Wan-Long Shang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
78. Reading is a rope in a deep well by Pam Muñoz Ryan . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
79. Reading gives breath to a new whisper by Aida Salazar . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
80. Reading can take you to so many different times and places
by Lisa Ann Sandell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
81. Reading is human by Allen Say . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
82. Reading can turn a classroom into a magic carpet by Augusta Scattergood . 171
83. Reading can help you survive by Eliot Schrefer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
84. Reading is a magic you can experience and create by Victoria Schwab. . . . 175
85. Reading shows you how words and pictures are different sides of the
same thing by Brian Selznick. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
86. Reading is good news by David Shannon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
87. Reading is cosmic by Kevin Sherry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
88. Reading can take you to a place called hope by Peter Sís . . . . . . . . . . . 183
89. Reading gives you invability by Jordan Sonnenblick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
90. Reading is full of small magic by Maggie Stiefvater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
91. Reading is an adventure! by Geronimo Stilton and Elisabetta Dami . . . . . . 189
92. Reading leads you to some real heroes by R.L. Stine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
93. Reading brings you unexpected friendships by Francisco X. Stork . . . . . . 193
94. Reading lets you have whatever power you want by Tui T. Sutherland. . . . 195
95. Reading is whatever you want it to be by Shaun Tan . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
96. Reading is rewarding . . . even when it’s hard to do by Lauren Tarshis . . . . 203
97. Reading is something you can pass down by Sarah Weeks . . . . . . . . . . 205
98. Reading is a radiant web of words by Scott Westerfeld . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
99. Reading gives you answers to questions you don’t even know to ask
by Deborah Wiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
100. Reading is incarnational by Jane Yolen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Closing Thought by Raina Telgemeier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215


About the Scholastic Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

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Editor’s Note

by David Levithan

I love reading because reading is many acts of connection all at once.


It is made from the connection an author feels to the characters and
the story.
It is made from the connection the author feels to the reader, and the
author’s hope that the reader will take something—meaning, enjoy-
ment, self-worth, imagination—from the words that have been put on
the page.
It is made from the connection the reader feels to the characters
and the story, and the way the reader can take thoughts that have
sprung from a stranger’s mind and feel how they apply to the reader’s
own life.
If you read the right words at the right time, they can make you feel
more at home in the world and more at home in yourself.
The authors in this book were asked to share a single reason they love
reading. As you’ll see, many of them went back to when they were kids,
and certain stories made all the difference to the course of their lives.
Others talk about seeing what the books they’ve written have meant once
the connection was made with a reader. In these pages, you will see how
reading can save lives, change lives, make lives better, and bring people
together, whether they are in the same family or have never met before. A
word that comes up a lot is magic, and I understand why, because the
connections that reading can make are the closest thing to magic that
I know.
As you’ll probably figure out pretty quickly, the reasons here are
arranged alphabetically by the authors’ last names. The numbering is not
meant to be a ranking—#94 is just as important as #2. Hopefully this is
a book you can dip into from time to time . . . or read in one big gulp, if
that’s how you choose. (That’s another great thing about reading—you

ix

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get to decide how you want to do it.) And if you like what an author has
to say, or the way that they’ve said it, I encourage you to check out their
books, some of which are listed at the end.
The simplest connection you can have to a book is to pick it up and
open it. If you’re reading this, that connection has already been made.
Thank you for being here.
Now, read on!

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Reading has always been my greatest
refuge, uniting me with people who’ve
lived different lives and who can offer
solace and wisdom.

Nothing makes me prouder than to think


Hogwarts has been a similar refuge to
others.
—J.K. Rowling
February 2020

“And just look at these books!” said Hermione excitedly, running


a finger along the spines of the large leather-bound tomes. “A
Compendium of Common Curses and Their Counter-Actions . . .
The Dark Arts Outsmarted . . . Self-Defensive Spellwork . . . wow . . .”
She looked around at Harry, her face glowing, and he saw that the
presence of hundreds of books had finally convinced Hermione that
what they were doing was right. “Harry, this is wonderful, there’s
everything we need here!”

And without further ado she slid Jinxes for the Jinxed from its shelf,
sank onto the nearest cushion, and began to read.
from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

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1. Reading gives you the power to understand

by K.A. Applegate

If you can read this sentence, congrats. You are in possession of the most
amazing superpower on the planet.
Nothing as mundane as something you’d find in the MCU or the DC
Universe. None of that invisibility or telekinesis stuff. No turning into
animals after you acquire their DNA.
Nope. This is way better.
Reading gives you the power to understand.
To understand others. Your family. Your friends. Your dog.
To understand yourself. Your moods. Your fears. Your hopes.
To understand the world. The present. The past. And most impor-
tantly, the future.
Maybe you’re thinking, Meh. I’d rather be able to morph into, say, a
red-tailed hawk. (And yeah, that would be pretty cool.)
But here’s the thing. When you understand the world, you can change
the world. And in case you haven’t noticed, the world could really use
some changing.
Superpowers evolve in strange ways. Maybe you’re bitten by a radio-
active spider. Maybe you travel to Earth from another planet. Maybe you
touch a glowing blue cube.
Or maybe you simply open a book and begin to read.
How does your reading superpower work? Well, as you read, you
become part of the story. You imagine. You empathize. You participate.
Participation. That’s what separates reading a book from all other
forms of entertainment. Movies and TV show you. Books need you.
Movies and TV show you the action, the setting, the characters. There
it all is, right in front of you on the screen. Filmmakers lay it out for you,
like a meal in a restaurant, all cooked and plated and garnished.
Books don’t do that. The difference between a book and a screenplay

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is that the screenplay is a set of instructions for a whole bunch of other
people: producers, directors, casting agents, cameramen, stunt coordina-
tors, wardrobe folks, props guys, tech wizards . . . on and on it goes.
When you read a book, all of those jobs are yours. You aren’t just a bit
player. The whole enterprise depends on you and your imagination.
Movies and TV are incredible. But let’s face it, your pet cat can watch
TV. It’s not that it isn’t involving, but you can sort of turn your brain
down to a low setting and watch a TV show. You aren’t contributing;
you’re just watching. Your name does not appear in the credits.
Ah, but with a book, you’re necessary. You fill in the gaps, expand the
ideas, make characters live. A screenplay cannot come alive without a
whole crew of professionals.
A book needs just you.
Every time you read—every time you participate in a story—you
understand the world just a little bit better. The more you read, the more
your superpower grows, and the more you can change yourself and the
world around you.
Now get to work. The universe needs you.
No pressure.

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2. Reading shows you how to be gone

by Avi

When I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, New York, living with my


family, attending the local public school, I lived (as far as I knew) an
ordinary life. There weren’t many escapades in my life. No adventures. I
don’t recall ever being punished, at home or in school, for doing anything
wrong. I wasn’t timid. I just didn’t do the things I had been told not to do.
In short, my world was not very eventful or exciting. It just was. My big-
gest problems: I was much shorter than my twin sister, and I couldn’t
spell.
I did spend good times with my friends, listened to the radio (a lot),
played stoop ball, and read books. Lots of them. It was the books that
levitated me into another world.
I’m not sure when I first read Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the
Willows. That I loved the book is attested to by the fact that I still own my
childhood copy. The friendship of Mole, Ratty, Badger, and Otter was, I
thought, akin to my own friendships with Richie, Philip, and Mike, my
best friends. But it was Mr. Toad who was my hero. What an unlikely
hero! Spoiled rich, bombastic, a thief, a liar, self-centered Mr. Toad.
Nothing like me, and yet, and yet, how wonderful he was. How delight-
fully charming, how thrilling, how exciting to be him, oh wonderful Mr.
Toad. How fantastic that, in spite of all those bad characteristics (perhaps
I haven’t listed them all), I could be all those things—in my head.
Then there was Treasure Island. I was amazed by how Jim Hawkins—
surely just my age, out on a high seas adventure in search of buried
treasure—defeated the gang of murderous pirates, saved the good adults,
found the treasure, discovered the castaway (mad Ben Gunn), and became
friends with Long John Silver, the wicked—oh, was he wicked!—pirate
chief. The thrill of being Jim in the apple barrel when he learns of the evil
plots of the pirates! The murderous struggle with Israel Hands, high in

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the ropes and masts of the good ship Hispaniola! His bravery. His
resourcefulness. His easy way with adults. If I couldn’t be Mr. Toad,
maybe I could be like Jim.
Ever since I read these books, I have tried to write such great books.
I never will.
But I’ll read The Wind in the Willows and Treasure Island again and
you won’t be able to find me. Don’t even look. I’ll be gone.

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3. Reading opens your mind

by David Baldacci

I was born and grew up in Richmond, Virginia, a place that was largely
segregated along racial lines at the time. The Brown v. Board of Education
decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal was
inherently unequal and that schools must be integrated with all due
speed, came down in 1954. Virginia was the first southern state to abide
by this urgent edict. I was part of the first class to be integrated. It was
1972. The “speed of a glacier” analogy would have done a disservice . . .
to glaciers.
Simply because the separation of the races was no longer legal didn’t
mean that people’s views changed. For much of my youth, many of the
folks I knew would find any notion of true equality absurd. And any
thought of this ever changing, despite the ruling from the Supreme Court,
was considered even more outrageous. It was the way it was because
it was always the way it was, a civil war and a civil rights movement
notwithstanding.
As a college student, I would pass down Monument Avenue,
Richmond’s most prestigious broadway, and see each day the enormous
statues of Confederate generals and political leaders erected there, glori-
fying those who fought to maintain slavery. Later came a long battle and
angry protests when there was a movement to add another statue to
Monument Avenue, that of native-born Richmonder and world-renowned
African American activist Arthur Ashe. At that point we were very near
the start of the twenty-first century, with incredibly heinous prejudices
lingering still.
Those tenacious and insidious beliefs could have been mine as well.
But my way out of this closed loop of thinking and living was reading
books, specifically at the public library where my parents took me, my
brother, and my sister every weekend. I checked out far more tomes than

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I was supposed to, because the librarian knew I would devour all of them
and be back the next week for more. I read about people who didn’t look
like me, eat like me, dress like me, learn like me, pray like me, or sound like
me, but were nonetheless exactly like me in all important respects,
namely in their humanity.
It has been my experience that readers are more tolerant, more curious
about life, more open to changing their opinions on things, and, most
importantly, more empathetic to others regardless of where they came
from. Mark Twain once said that travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and
narrow-mindedness. He spoke from experience because he was the most
traveled person of his time. But for those who lack the opportunity to
circumvent the world on a whim, “travels” can be done by simply open-
ing a book. Plane travel has made the world smaller. Yet books have
always made the world available for all to experience, without the hassle
of long TSA lines and crammed flights.
I might be a very different person today, if I were not a reader. I might
be the sort of person that the current me would not like to be around. But
I’m not, because I opened a book.
And so can we all.

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4. Reading is a purple crayon

by Blue Balliett

Holding a book you can’t forget—one that delights and haunts you—can
equal holding power. This I know to be true!
As a kid, I was shy but deeply curious. Questions and big ideas chased
each other around my mind. Sometimes I think the person I was when I
first fell in love with books is exactly who I still am: an escapist Wonderer
with a What-If view of things. Reading stories reassured me that the
world was a big place, with many ways of seeing and doing—and plenty
of Unrecognized Thinkers like me.
I believe with all my heart that reading the right book at the right
time—at any age—can lead to finding a path in the real world. For me,
this goes back to Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon,
which I first experienced at four years old. Thick crayon in hand, Harold
creates an exciting world that he then explores. When his purple lines
begin to take over, he draws himself back out and returns home to his
own bed.
What Harold did is what every writer does, but I didn’t realize this for
years.
As a kid, someone most definitely without power, I climbed into book
after book. When E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs.
Basil E. Frankweiler came out, I was twelve years old. Growing up in
New York City and knowing that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a
real place, I couldn’t get over the thrill of this story. For years after read-
ing that novel, I imagined myself as a cooler, braver Blue within my
familiar world, a person tackling puzzles involving great art. Someone
who could get things done! Filled with hope and an ambition to fix what
seemed wrong, I felt certain that books proved this could happen.
Decades later, I began writing stories that I wanted in my home as a
parent and in my classroom, as a teacher—books about kids who tackle

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possibilities that the adults around them have missed. These kids visual-
ize what needs to happen and then chart their way through some tough
problems. I realize that all of my books grew from mysteries rooted in
the real world. Chasing Vermeer, The Wright 3, The Calder Game, The
Danger Box, Hold Fast, Pieces and Players, Out of the Wild Night . . .
My awkward, determined characters all seem to be partly me, armed
with serendipity and a handful of challenges that belong to us all. In my
writing, I return again and again to questions about the meaning of art, of
home, of dreams and unexpected friendship—and about the ways people
navigate a change that tips their lives upside down.
I can’t imagine who I would be without all the reading I’ve done—or
what a world without books would be like. I believe that lives are built
from the earliest stories we’ve loved. Does this mean that my world as I
know it began with a single purple crayon?

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5.

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6. Reading makes you an interesting person on an
interesting journey

by Judy Blundell

A few years ago, my family underwent an upheaval. We moved from a


small village to a new town. My daughter was twelve at the time, and I
went through some considerable mom agony at the thought of her start-
ing a new school in the middle of the school year. There is no doubt in my
mind that I was in my worst mom-cheerleader mode—What a great
school! Let’s look at clubs you could join!—but I was just as nervous as
my daughter, because I remember middle school.
So picture this: It is a gray January day. From the car, we watch the
other kids surging into school, a jostling, teasing, laughing crowd, and
she is nervous and I am worse, and I ask with sudden terror, “Will you
have to eat alone in the cafeteria?”
And she says: “Don’t worry about me, Mom. I’ll be fine. I have
a book.”
I watched her go that day, shouldering that hundred-pound backpack
as well as her shyness, her fear, and her courage . . . and the clouds parted,
and the angels sang, and I thought: She’ll be okay. She has a book.
Because with a book we are never alone.
I know what you’re thinking: What about our digital devices? Go
ahead, look at a screen when you’re alone. You’re not fooling anybody.
You’re just someone trying to look busy.
Ah, but if you hold a book? An actual book, with a cover that someone
can peek at? You are silently and powerfully announcing that you are an
interesting person in the middle of an interesting journey.
Books are portals. Books are escape. Books are comfort. Books are all
of these things, but they are also a way of demonstrating your absolute
cool. I know what you’re thinking: You’re a writer, so of course you think
this. But I’m telling you, while everyone else is looking at a phone to

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watch a cat video (and I love a good cat video, don’t get me wrong, but
stay with me here), with a book you are lost in an invented world. You are
with animals who talk and people who fly. You are with thieves and drag-
ons and invisible dogs. Or you are learning deep truths about your own
world. You are learning about who you are.
And what is cooler than that?
Let’s time travel to another day. I am nineteen. I have arrived at col-
lege a few days early. The campus is empty, but the library is open and
air-conditioned. I wander to fiction, starting with A. This one book at eye
level practically falls into my hand. It is Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice, a book I’d read in eighth grade and had not enjoyed. As a mat-
ter of fact, I resented that baffling book for even existing.
I open to the first page and begin to read. I laugh. I sink down on the
floor and finish the chapter. I finish the book the next day. I take out
another Austen. Then another. By the time classes begin, I have decided
to change my major from journalism to English. Because I cannot imag-
ine anything better than this.
That decision changed my life. It made me a novelist.
Reading the right book at the right time can keep you company or
change your life.
Try it. Especially on a day you feel weird or squishy or left out. You’ll
be fine. You have a book.

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7. Reading works whenever you get to it

by Coe Booth

I was a writer before I was a reader.


Yeah, I was that kid at school, the one who was always kind of in
her own world. I mean, I was having so much fun creating characters
and writing about their lives, who had time for mine? Even in second and
third grade, I was happier writing than, well, doing anything else!
When I think about it now, it’s hard to figure out why I didn’t read. It
should have been a natural fit. If you like to write, you should like to
read, right?
Um, no. Not really.
At that time, books seemed out of reach for me. They didn’t exactly
pull me in their direction. Honestly, I thought books just weren’t for kids
like me.
Rarely did I see books about people who looked like me. And when
they looked like me, they didn’t live where I lived or do the things I
did. The characters and the stories seemed so far away.
So I wrote the kind of stories I wanted to read.
I wrote about black girls in the city, girls who were sometimes going
through hard times at home or with their friends. I wrote about girls who
got their hair braided, who played double Dutch, and whose parents
sometimes struggled to make ends meet.
More than anything, I wrote about girls who, like me, were just trying
to figure themselves out.
I was doing all that writing, but I still wasn’t reading.
Luckily for me, in fourth grade I found Judy Blume. Her novel Are
You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. was the first book I really read
on my own, just for me. The main character looked nothing like me, and
she definitely wasn’t from the Bronx, but a lot of her story was my story. She

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was a girl around my age who was growing up and wanted her life to
make sense. Just like I did.
This was the first book I savored. Loved. It was the book that broke
through. I guess you could say it was the key that unlocked the whole new
world of books for me. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the key I had
been waiting for.
After that, I read everything! I think I was trying to make up for lost
time. There were so many books I wanted to read. Needed to read.
And it wasn’t too late!
Now, many, many years later, I’m still writing the stories I like to read,
and I sometimes get letters from kids who are also coming to reading a
little later than most people.
I received an email from a boy who wrote, “I’m fifteen years old and
your book is the first book I ever read, like, for real. I read the whole
thing.”
Talk about full circle!
Imagine that little girl in the Bronx growing up to write something
that’s a key for someone else, a book that hopefully will unlock a whole
new reading world for another kid. I can’t even tell you how exciting
that is.
The good thing is, it really is never too late to become a reader.

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8. Reading brings sage advice

by Ann E. Burg

The house was a grand old dwelling with a large, rolling lawn and great
armchair stoop with a sycamore tree out front. Three families lived in
it—our apartment was in the middle—two large bedrooms, a living
room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and sunroom. The sunroom with
its yellow walls and brown wicker chairs was my favorite, but it was the
dining room that had the small window overlooking my world—my
stoop, front sidewalk, and much-loved sycamore.
Brooklyn was the center of my universe. Everyone I loved lived inside
its leafy borders and I knew every crack in the pavement, every neighbor
who passed by on their way to and from work or school. On Sundays we’d
visit Grandma, and every two weeks, my mother, brother, and I boarded
the big green bus that would bring us to the library.
Why do you always bring home the same book? my brother asked
whenever I found Little Pear stuck in the stacks again. Why wouldn’t I?
Though he lived far away in a one-room house made of sunbaked bricks,
in a village surrounded by bean and cabbage fields, Little Pear was my
friend. I couldn’t just leave him squeezed on a library shelf, barely breath-
ing, unread and unloved.
When we moved to New Jersey, there were lots of trees—a whole
woods right in our backyard. But no favorite sycamore. No sunroom. No
stoop. No big green city bus. I could sit on the curb for hours with only
squirrels, birds, and bugs to keep me company.
And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be
where someone loved him best of all. Finally! Words to label the floaty
feeling I sometimes felt with my New Jersey friends.
Books help me understand the world. They build bridges to people and
places we might not otherwise know. “You never really understand a per-
son,” Atticus tells Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, “until you consider

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things from his point of view.” Every time we open a book, every time we
care about a character, we build empathy with others and gain a deeper
understanding of ourselves.
Even now, when my voice feels small and inconsequential, I remem-
ber the pale-looking angel with three freckles on his right cheek and a
policeman’s badge on his green corduroy shirt. I was five years old when
I met him in Ben and the Green Corduroy Angel, the shiny blue book
with the crackled spine. “What you do and say means something,” the
angel says. “Not just to me but to everyone you know.” Good advice for
all of us. Loud or soft, shy or not so shy, our voices are important.
Sometimes the world is leafy and lovely and we are surrounded by
everything—sidewalk cracks or cabbage fields—that makes us feel safe
and loved. Other times the world is strange and scary.
“Life is a struggle and a good spy gets in there and fights,” Harriet
explains in the book Harriet the Spy.
More sage advice from the pages of a book. For me this is the peren-
nial joy of reading!

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9. Reading can introduce you to the people you
need in your life

by Kacen Callendar

To be honest, I was an extremely lonely kid. For years I wasn’t accepted


at the private school I attended as the Black and local student; other locals
didn’t accept me because I spoke like a “Yankee,” or like a person from
the States. I always felt like an outsider, and I really didn’t have any
friends.
Well, I didn’t have any friends who were real, anyway.
I didn’t know it then, but books were my friends. The characters from
countless stories who went on endless adventures were the people who
kept me going. When I was a child, the fact that I was so ostracized that
my only friends were imaginary was devastatingly embarrassing—but
I’m grateful for that now. Reading teaches empathy, and I met an array of
people I might not have ever met otherwise. From the time I’d reached
middle school, I was the only person in my class who would yell at any-
one who ever said anything homophobic, not yet knowing that I would
grow to identify as both queer and trans myself. This definitely didn’t
help the bullying or ostracization, but I was able to learn how to love
others—and, even if I hadn’t realized it yet, I was also learning how to
love myself.
My mother would read to me almost every night when I was young.
Some favorites as a five-year-old were the Berenstain Bears and
the Good Dog, Carl board book. As I got older, my mom would read the
Animorphs series to me. This is the first time I remember being so
excited about a book that I would jump up and down on the bed, scream-
ing in excitement, arms flailing. Besides the extremely intense plot (alien
slugs in brains!) and amazing cast of characters, I was really excited
because Animorphs introduced me to Cassie, a Black girl who was smart
and kind and loved by her friends. It was the first time I saw an author

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decide that someone who looked like me was important enough to be the
hero who saved the world. To this day, Cassie remains one of my oldest
and closest friends. Whenever I think of her, I feel a wave of courage and
strength, the same feeling I’d have if someone were to remind me that I’m
worthy of being loved and respected, and that I belong.
Cassie isn’t real, but the love her author put into her character is real.
Cassie might not be a person outside the pages of the books I still have in
my childhood home’s closet, but that love transferred from her creator
and was put into words. That love spreads through every young reader
who reads the books. My imaginary friendship with a series and a char-
acter became a tool of self-love. It’s the same tool I wield every time I sit
down to write a book. I hope to transfer that same love in my words, and
to create characters who will be friends to any reader, young or old, who
needs them most.

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10. Reading is the magic found

by Sharon Cameron

The year of my eleventh birthday, I lost a treasure. Fifteen dollars.


In 1981, fifteen dollars was vast wealth. Untold riches. An amount that
could transform my summer, because it was the last installment needed
to buy my longed-for ten-speed bike. My pink birthday card with a white-
and-purple swan printed on its front had been full of dreams. Now it was
empty. The money had vanished, and I was left with the certainty of
impending doom. My mother was going to be mad. Very mad.
So I didn’t tell her. I made a million excuses about not buying the bike,
shut the door to my room, and read books all summer instead.
I have book crushes. I first realized this during my bike-less summer.
I fall in love with a book and read it over and over again. In the days when
checking out a library book meant signing your name on the little card
that slid into the paper pocket inside the back cover, it secretly pleased me
to see my own signature there, stacked up line after line. The book might
belong to the library, the plot and characters to the author, but the story
was mine. All mine. In some magical way, a story that had been part of
someone else had become part of me.
There’s a wonder and a mystery in this. That summer, for the first
time, I understood a little of the magic, and I gained so much more than I
had lost.
Last year, I picked up one of those books I fell in love with when I was
eleven. It was about an ancient house with ghosts in its cellar, and a secret
tunnel that crossed the lane to a graveyard, where an old woman sat on
her knees and lovingly washed the tombstones. And the book talked
about time. How time was like an old wall, built stone upon stone, with
hard, irregular, unchanging pieces that somehow managed to sit side by
side and create something beautiful.
It was so me.

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It’s no wonder my eleven-year-old soul was thrilled by that book. I’m
still thrilled by it. These are the ideas I write about now. Ancient places,
secrets, extraordinary people, things that time should never be allowed to
forget. Because long ago, during a long, empty summer, magic traveled
from an author to a book to a reader. I was changed, and now that same
magic travels back out into books again. This is the never-ending circle.
A magic that was, is, and will always be, as long as there are readers and
authors, and as long as there are books.
And so it’s no wonder I went back to the library that summer I was
eleven, my fingers trailing along the spines, and pulled that book once
again from the shelf. It’s not so strange that I put my signature beneath
the stack of my signatures already on the card. It’s really no mystery at
all that I took that book back home to my room, opened it, and saw my
fifteen dollars tucked between the pages.
I had gained so much more than I found. And that is magic.

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11. Reading is good trouble

by Angela Cervantes

When I was a kid, I used to get in trouble for reading too much. It’s true.
I’d lug books everywhere I went, including to the dinner table. In between
bites of chicken enchiladas or forkfuls of spaghetti, I’d read. I’d read right
up until my mom would call out my full name: “Angela Christina
Cervantes! Put the book away now and eat dinner!” As my siblings gig-
gled, I’d stash the book away before my mom could warn me a second
time. A second warning was really a final warning. There would be no
third warning.
Only once did I ignore that first warning. I was reading E.B. White’s
Charlotte’s Web at the dinner table and thought I had time to read just a
little bit more before my mom put her foot down. It probably didn’t help
that my mom had served pork for dinner and I wasn’t planning on touch-
ing it—in honor of Wilbur, of course!
With the second warning, the book was snatched out of my hands. I
didn’t get the book back for a full two days. Pure torture!
At school visits, I tell kids about how I used to get into trouble for
reading too much. Most of the students and teachers nod in recognition
when I admit this fact.
“How many of you have ever gotten into trouble for reading too
much?” I ask.
Hundreds of hands fly up, eagerly wanting to tell me about the time a
favorite book got them into trouble. Once, a student said he was busted
reading Captain Underpants at church instead of listening to the sermon.
Another time, a kid said she stayed up reading my book Lety Out Loud
all night under her covers while the rest of her family slept. She woke up
dead tired the next day.
“Was it worth it?” I asked.
“Yes!”

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Then there was the kid who admitted to me and his entire fifth-grade
class that he pretended to be sick one day just so he could miss school and
finish Holes by Louis Sachar. His teacher just smiled with a glimmer of
pride in her eyes.
After listening to kids’ stories about the level of sneakiness they’ll go
to, to keep reading, I proudly tell them, “You’re my people.” It’s no joke.
Readers are exactly the kind of troublemakers who will always be my
people.
The truth is, reading made me a writer. And when I sit down to write,
I write with the colossal hope that my book will be so good and so loved
that a third grader isn’t going to be able to put it down at the dinner table,
even after they’ve been warned multiple times. I hope that a fourth grader
is going to lug my book to their place of worship and get so busted for it.
And somewhere out there, way past bedtime, a fifth grader is going to
sneak my book under the covers and read, read, read until they’ve fin-
ished the last line. This idea fills my heart with joy. Is it awful that I strive
to create book-loving troublemakers?
Don’t answer that.
The fact is, reading is good trouble. It’s the kind of trouble we should
all be getting into. You can tell your parents I said that.

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12. Reading conjures new landscapes

by Lucy Christopher

I found my love for reading in a hot, strange land when I was nine years
old. I was curled up in the back of a Holden station wagon with Elyne
Mitchell’s The Silver Brumby clutched tight. I was reading about Thowra,
a wild stallion who steals away domestic mare Golden, then shows her
his magnificent bush home in the Snowy Mountains. I knew if I kept my
head down reading, I wouldn’t have to talk to everyone else.
The everyone else was the Bolwell family we’d just bought a house
from, who were taking me camping. Strange, perhaps, to go away with
our house’s previous owners, but I’d been in Australia only a few months
and didn’t have any other friends. Claire was a year older than me and her
sister, Sarah, a year younger—instant besties, perhaps. But they were
everything I was not—they slathered Vegemite onto their crackers and
wiggled it through the holes, they swam like fish in their own pool, and their
dad took them camping. We didn’t own a pool, or a tent, or Vegemite. I
hadn’t had a dad for a while either; part of the reason for moving was
getting to know him.
On the drive, Mr. Bolwell joked about snakes, spiders, hot days and
freezing nights—all that awaited us camping. I picked up one of Claire’s
books, discarded in the footwell, and hid in its leaves. Land and time are
very long on Australian road trips; it’s possible it took the same amount
of hours to finish the book as to reach our destination. Mitchell’s The
Silver Brumby was a dream I sank into in sprawling Melbourne suburbs
and awoke from in a mountainous national park. Perhaps I blinked when
I did so, the forests and granite tors of Mitchell’s book conjured to
reality.
I devoured more of Mitchell’s series on future camping trips. Soon I
read them aloud to Claire and Sarah by flashlight to a background of
cicadas. I loved that nature in Mitchell’s books was not calm or typically

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English—instead wind roared, horses ran wild, and landscape was
unpredictable. Mitchell’s awe-filled descriptions made me observe the
land I was in with fresh interest, too. Soon, I saw my first snake, laughed
with the others at wombat poo outside our tent, and even witnessed my
own wild brumbies. My previously tightly wound roots were feeling a
tentative path through Australian dirt; I was connecting with the land I’d
been so scared of.
Mitchell’s rich imagery continued to pull me through those early
years, her words like crumbs leading me deeper into the bush. She
showed me something magical and wonderful in Australia, and the
Bolwell family helped me find it. During a school trip months later, I was
first to volunteer for the bush walk challenge.
When I wrote my first novel, Stolen, I recalled my early reading of
Mitchell’s Brumby books. I remembered that in The Silver Brumby,
Thowra shows Golden the beauty and power of his home; he wants her to
love it and live with him inside it. Stolen is also about a young female
kidnapped to wild Australian land and encouraged to love it, this time a
human girl rather than a horse. Perhaps, then, my childhood reading of
The Silver Brumby gave me more than I realized—not only encouraging
my love for Australian land, and also its literature, but also sowing seeds
for my own novel. Mitchell’s The Silver Brumby made me need and
depend on reading in a new and exciting way; Mitchell also made me
love a land so much that I had to write about it myself.

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CLASS, LET’S TALK ABOUT
WHY WE LIKE TO READ.

I READ TO LEARN THINGS, I LIKE TO DRAW.


WHEN PEOPLE ASK: SO I READ ABOUT ARTISTS.
WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN? WHY DID THEY DO
AND HOW? AND WHY? THE KIND OF ART THEY DID?
SOME PEOPLE SAY, WHO KNOWS?, AND HOW DID THEY DO IT?
I SAY, FIND OUT! I WANT TO KNOW HOW A KID
AND IF PEOPLE SAY STUFF MIGHT BECOME AN ARTIST.
THAT ISN’T TRUE,
I WANT TO KNOW THAT, TOO.

I LIKE READING ABOUT


HOW TO MAKE THINGS, I LIKE TO READ ABOUT HISTORY.
LIKE MODEL ROCKETS. THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY AND
HOW DO I MAKE ONE FLY THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD,
AND NOT CRASH? WHERE MY FAMILY CAME FROM
MAYBE SOMEDAY MY ROCKETS AND HOW THEY GOT HERE.
WILL GO TO JUPITER, AND BEYOND.

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I LIKE TO READ STORIES ABOUT I LIKE POETRY AND STORIES
HOW KIDS FEEL WHEN THINGS HAPPEN THAT ARE INSPIRING.
THAT THEY DON’T EXPECT. HOW PEOPLE OVERCOME OBSTACLES
LIKE WHEN THEY MOVE TO A NEW TOWN AND MAKE GOOD LIVES
AND A NEW SCHOOL AND HAVE TEACHERS AND FIND GOOD FRIENDS,
WHO ARE . . . DIFFERENT. PEOPLE WHO CAN RISE ABOVE
HATE AND HEAL THE WORLD.

I LIKE STORIES ABOUT KIDS


KNOCK, KNOCK . . . OH, CARLOS!
WHO BECOME VERY GOOD
AT WHAT THEY LIKE TO DO,
LIKE, PLAYING SOCCER,
OR CLIMBING MOUNTAINS,
OR TELLING JOKES.
EVEN IF PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS
TELLING THEM
THEY AREN’T FUNNY,
THEY KNOW THEY ARE FUNNY.

A BOOK CAN TAKE YOU I’M GLAD YOU SAID THAT, ARNOLD!
TO A MEDIEVAL CASTLE THAT IS WHAT OUR CLASS
OR TO THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN IS DOING TODAY!
OR TO THE NORTH POLE. LET’S GO, KIDS!
AND YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO LEAVE HOME,
WHERE IT IS RELATIVELY SAFE.
JUST OPEN A BOOK
AND IT CAN TAKE YOU ANYWHERE.
I DIDN’T MEAN IT
LITERALLY!

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14. Reading taps into knowledge

by Suzanne Collins

My family has a tradition we call Fall Weekend, which is misleading. It’s


really Fall Afternoon. When the leaves are peaking in Connecticut, we
drive around to see the beautiful foliage, stop at an orchard to sip hot
cider and eat doughnuts, and lay in a supply of apples.
This year, I impulsively bought a packet of maple candy, each piece
prettily molded into the shape of a maple leaf. I’d always wanted to try it
because of a book I’d loved as a child, Understood Betsy by Dorothy
Canfield Fisher. In the book, nine-year-old Betsy, after a hard day at
school, comes home to find her grown-up Cousin Ann boiling down
maple sap into syrup. She’s given a cup of the hot syrup to pour in loops
and curves onto packed snow to make candy. They called it waxed
sugar. Concentrated sweetness of summer days was in that mouthful,
part of it still hot and aromatic, part of it icy and wet with melting
snow. Yum.
My daughter remembered them making maple candy on plates of
snow in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods and pour-
ing the syrup into pans to harden into sugar. Our maple leaves were more
like the latter, crunchy and grainy and dissolving deliciously on our
tongues.
Neither of us had ever tapped a maple tree for sap, boiled it into syrup,
or made candy, but we knew about it from books we’d read as kids. I
found out that you can dye white fabric with tea from the All-of-a-Kind
Family series, and Encyclopedia Brown taught me that if you can spin an
egg like a top, it’s hard-boiled.
So many things I discovered reading books were like seeds that grew
inside me and then blossomed in my own work. Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland inspired Gregor’s tumbling through a grate in his laundry
room to a world beneath New York City in the Underland Chronicles. The

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siege of Leningrad in Boris introduced me to the concept of using starva-
tion as a weapon, which takes many forms in The Hunger Games. And
Betsy’s family making maple syrup? That came back in Catching Fire
when Katniss uses a spile to tap a tree for water when she’s desperately
thirsty in the arena.
When you are lost in a story, without even noticing it, you are soaking
up knowledge like a sponge. I love reading books because you effort-
lessly learn things that can stay with you for a lifetime.

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15. Reading is a shared journey

by Bruce Coville

When I was a kid, my father was a traveling salesman, which meant


he was away from home fairly often. The natural result of this was that
time with him was a valuable commodity, one that my sibs and I strug-
gled over.
We didn’t perceive Dad as a reader—at least, not of books. But one
night, for reasons I have never understood (though it occurs to me now
that it might have been due to a nudge from my mother) he took me into
the living room, opened a thick brown book called Tom Swift in the City
of Gold, and started to read to me.
In doing so, he opened not just a book, but the world.
Was it a great book? No, not really. Was it a great story? Oh yeah!
But the greatest thing about it was sharing that time with my dad.
Night after night he took me along on this adventure with Tom and his
friends as they traveled underground in search of the mysterious City of
Gold. It became our adventure, too.
Flash forward twenty-some years and I’m a dad myself, reading a
book for a college class on fantasy literature. My five-year-old son, who
is feeling out of sorts because there is a new baby in the house, climbs up
next to me and says, “What are you reading?”
“It’s called The Hobbit.”
“Read it to me.”
“I don’t think you’re ready for it.”
“Read it to me!” he demands, in a way that only a five-year-old can.
So I turn back to the beginning and start reading aloud, figuring he’ll
soon get tired of it.
Two weeks later we finish the book, having shared an adventure that
carried us all the way to the Misty Mountains and into the cave of the

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fearsome dragon Smaug. And for weeks after that we play Hobbit, with
my son being Bilbo and me being all thirteen dwarves.
Jump ahead again. I am about to drive cross-country with the baby
mentioned above. She is now fourteen. Knowing that the two of us will
be in the car for thousands of miles over a period of weeks, we stock up
on audiobooks. Driving from coast to coast and back again, my daughter
and I see an array of awesome and wonderful things. But for both of us,
one of the strongest memories of that thirty-years-ago trip is the stories
we listened to as we traveled, stories we experienced together that have
become a shared memory.
We tend to think of reading as being a solitary activity. But whether it
is a dad or mom reading to their child, a teacher reading to his or her
class, two or more friends reading a book at the same time, or an older
sibling reading to younger, reading together is one of the most powerful
ways I know to forge a lasting connection with another person.
I love reading by myself, hunkered down in a chair and living in a
story. I truly do. But for me, one of the most fabulous things about read-
ing is that it is something you can do with friends and family, binding you
in the spell of story and creating a connection or a shared memory that
can last for the rest of your lives.

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16. Reading enables you to learn from a
world of authors

by Christopher Paul Curtis

There are two reasons I’m so much in love with reading, one personal and
one professional.
Professionally, I love reading because every time I pick up a book, I
rediscover the fountain of youth; I’m thrown back in time and become a
student again. With each page I turn, decades fall away and I become
ten-year-old Christopher sitting in Mr. Alums’s English class awaiting
that day’s lesson.
Everything I read, from the finest literature to the slightest piece of
fluff, becomes a lesson. I’m instructed on ways to make my writing more
similar or less similar to what I’m reading.
I am so grateful to be living at this time because in spite of the many
downsides of technology, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t that long ago
that books and the ability to read them were rare. Only the wealthiest
individuals had the time, education, and finances necessary to take
advantage of this marvelous skill. My ancestors were forbidden by law
from learning to read. But we’re living in an age where we have a relative
embarrassment of riches, where libraries have become the great equal-
izers, making books and authors available to all.
I can go to the library and get a book written by Toni Morrison or
Walter Dean Myers and love the book for the way it reads. But I also get
a free lesson from Ms. Morrison on how to move a scene around, and Mr.
Myers can teach me how to make a reader feel a certain way. When or
where else would I be able to do that? That’s one of the reasons I love
reading.
Personally, I love reading because I am a human being, and a large
part of being human is finding a great deal of comfort in belonging to a

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group, a team, or some other form of family. For me, reading is the yellow-
brick road that leads to that comfort.
When I read a book, I am given confirmation of a theme that runs
through much of literature: In spite of superficial, cosmetic, trivial differ-
ences, you and I are much more similar to the other seven-and-a-half
billion people on Earth than we are different.
One of the ways reading accomplishes this is because a well written
book is nothing less than a magical tool that allows us to see inside
another person’s intimate thoughts, giving us a bit of insight as to why
they feel the way they do.
Being an author is a very different job than most; even though a book
is the result of many, many people working many, many hours, the cre-
ative process, where an author uses his or her words to say something, is
usually done alone. Most authors work by themselves—it’s hour after
hour of you and your computer or you and your pen and paper.
By reading, I am able to invite any author I choose, contemporary or
long gone, into my home to teach me how to become a better writer. And
the best part is that I have a great time while I’m learning.
What’s there not to love about reading?

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17. Reading comforts and heals

by Edwidge Danticat

M te konn renmen lapli.


“I used to love the rain,” a ten-year-old boy tells me when I ask him
how the massive 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010,
killed three hundred thousand people, and left a million and a half home-
less, had changed him.
Now the rain has become his enemy, he tells me, a kind of terror. Rain
now means lightning that struck and killed a baby in his displacement
camp. Rain now means that the floor on which he sleeps turns to mud.
Rain now means sometimes standing up all night in fear of floods.
Another thing that has changed in the lives of the children who are
read to on a weekly basis by the passionate Haitian readers of the Port-au-
Prince–based Li, Li, Li! (Read, Read, Read!) reading-out-loud program?
Nou pa t konn cho kon sa.
“We weren’t always so hot,” some of the children say. “We did not
always live in a tent.”
In the midst of such sadness and turmoil, why read to displaced chil-
dren who live in tents? I ask the readers, some of them homeless
themselves.
“We read to these children for the same reason people read to other
children,” the readers say. “We read to them to help them grow their
imagination, to teach them about the world around them. And beyond
them. We also read to them to comfort them and to help them heal after
this terrible disaster.”
A few months after the earthquake, I had the honor of reading Eight
Days, an English-language picture book I’d written about the earthquake,
to the displaced children in a tent camp often visited by Li, Li, Li! readers
in Port-au-Prince. The book tells the story of a little boy who survives the
same earthquake that had devastated these children’s lives. The boy

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survived after spending eight days in the rubble of his house, while using
his memories and imagination to keep himself hopeful. I read Eight
Days, using the pictures, while doing a simultaneous translation in
Haitian Creole. Though I was afraid of upsetting the children by remind-
ing them of the trauma of the earthquake, they were braver than me in
addressing the issue at hand.
“Has someone close to you ever died?” one girl asked me.
“Yes,” I answered.
“In the earthquake?” another asked.
“Yes.”
“Who?” the boy who loved the rain asked.
I told him about my cousin and his son, who was about his age. Our
family house had collapsed on top of them, I told him, and they had not
survived. And for a moment this boy and I had a brief conversation that
we might not have had were it not for the story.
“Has the earthquake changed you?” he asked me.
Not expecting that question, I stuttered.
“It’s changed us all,” I ventured before turning the question back to
him. And that’s when he told me about the rain, a common memory for
both of us—mine decades old and his, only months old—of a head turned
upward and a mouth opened toward a once-benign sky pouring out
“good” rain. Much like the sky once did for another boy, my dead cous-
in’s dead son, as well as the young survivor I had written about in
my book.
Could a book ever teach a child to love the rain again?
Probably not.
Can books offer comfort and perhaps even help a child (and an adult)
begin to heal after such a catastrophic event?
I sure hope so. Actually, now I know it’s definitely possible.

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18. Reading is good medicine

by Sayantani DasGupta

When I was in practice as a pediatrician—a doctor for babies and young


people—I used to write prescriptions for reading. Every time a family of
a baby or toddler came to see me for their checkup, I would take out
a special prescription pad and write read to your baby twenty minutes a
day on it and then present the family with a book that they could take
home and enjoy together.
Why did I do this? Why did I prescribe reading, in the same way I
might write down the name of a medicine to treat an ear infection or a
stomachache? Because I knew, just like doctors all around the country
who still do this know, that stories are good medicine. Reading together
as a family helps teach words and language, helps bond families
together, and helps children not only read earlier but learn to love books
for a lifetime.
But, as I know from experience, reading can be good medicine in
other ways too. Stories can be a place of imagination and escape. When I
was growing up as a daughter of immigrants from India, there weren’t a
lot of other kids who looked like me or whose families had moved from
countries far away, like mine had. I had a number of really good friends,
but I had a lot of bullies too. These were kids who said mean things to
me because my family spoke a different language or ate different food, or
because my skin color was a dark brown. I found a lot of comfort by
escaping into stories, and imagining myself in different time periods, or
different universes, or inside different characters.
Unfortunately, even though I loved them, there weren’t a lot of people
who looked like me in the books I was reading or the movies and TV
shows I was watching either. That lack of seeing myself in stories made
the bullying more painful at some level. Even as reading was a way to
escape, not seeing myself represented made me wonder if kids like me

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didn’t deserve to be the heroes of books, or even the stars of our own sto-
ries. Which was a wrong and painful idea, of course, but I still thought it.
When I grew up and had kids of my own, I realized that I never wanted
my kids or any other kids to feel this way. I wanted stories to be not just
an escape, but a source of strength! So I decided to write my Kiranmala
and the Kingdom Beyond stories for the twelve-year-old I used to be and
for my own kids—so they could see a brown immigrant daughter being
awesome, fighting monsters, cracking jokes, and saving the multiverse! I
wanted to tell my kids, and all kids who read this series, that superheroes
come in all genders, colors, and backgrounds. In fact, to solve the prob-
lems of the world, we’re going to need all the different heroes we can get!
Reading helps us learn. It helps us escape. It helps us grow strong. It
helps us imagine. Reading is good medicine in so many ways—for us, for
our world, for the multiverse.
When we read, we can imagine not only new heroes but new ways for
the world to be: more fair, more just, more full of love and laughter and
acceptance. When stories fully represent our todays, they help us dream
better tomorrows for us all.

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19. Reading lets you know that you, too,
have a story to tell

by Lulu Delacre

Why love reading? ¿Porqué amar la lectura? When you love to read, you
hop from one book to another. From worlds of shapes, colors, and num-
bers to those of cars, planes, and trains. You dwell on drawings of
beautiful birds, incredible insects, magnificent mammals, and fabulous
fish. You cross roaring rivers and wander through woods. You climb
marvelous mountains and gaze back at footprints tattooed in a golden
sand dune. You go underwater without getting wet. You travel through
space without missing a breath. You visit with dinosaurs that lived long
ago and listen to creatures still to be born. You discover churches and
mosques, royal palaces and humble huts. And as the art in the book gives
way to thousands of words, you stumble on that special story, the story
with which you connect. When you love reading, you leaf through so
many pages that you end up realizing that you, too, have a story to tell.
I know for a fact that every reader is a writer at heart. I’ve read aloud
stories set in Spanish-speaking countries or within a Latinx home life.
I’ve gazed up from the page to look at the young audience in front of
me. I’ve seen that sparkle of understanding in the kids looking back. In
them I see you. I see when you click with a main character speaking
words in español. You connect to a short story that celebrates family
traditions like yours. And so it is that although you think you have noth-
ing to say, out of fear of making mistakes, you know you also have lived
like the story’s hero did. You’ve cried and laughed. You’ve feared and
conquered. You’ve failed and succeeded. You’ve imagined and dreamed.
You are the main character of your own life. And so you can weave your
past into fiction. It’s only a matter of learning my trick.
At schools nationwide I give children some tools. I say, “Think of your
favorite foods, for everyone eats. Think of a dish you can’t wait to taste

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once again, on that annual holiday that calls for sharing it among family
and friends.” This is the request that prompts scores of hands to go up.
“Hallacas, tamales, pupusas, burritos, pasteles, mangú, arroz con leche”
are a few of the answers I’ve heard in the past twenty years. So I hand you
the recipe I learned from Virginia Hamilton, a remarkable writer who
came before me. It’s the same one that I’ve given to hundreds of readers
like you: Use what you remember, what you know, and what you imagine
might happen next. Put words onto paper and tell your family story, for
everyone has a story to tell. You see, one day your brand-new short story
may turn future readers into writers as well.

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20. Reading leads to a world of infinite adventures

by Chris D’Lacey

It may seem strange, but I barely read a thing when I was young. My
parents had no interest in books. We were not a reading household.
Occasionally, I would pick up a Marvel comic and lose myself in the
superhero world. But books were never on my horizon.
All this changed one afternoon when I was fourteen. I was sitting in
an English class, bored. My teacher, Mr. Sidney, was pacing the room,
reading to us from Shakespeare. Mr. Sidney was an elderly scholar. He
wore a brown flannel suit, dusted with chalk marks. While he droned
through Hamlet, I had my hands in my lap, fingers interlaced, thumbs
twirling like a small turbine. Mr. Sidney stopped by my chair. He said,
“Can’t you do anything, boy, but twiddle your thumbs like that?” I replied,
“Yes, sir; I can twiddle my thumbs like this.” And I turned the turbine in
the opposite direction.
As a result, I was sent to the library after school, to spend an hour
there contemplating my impertinence. A teacher called Mr. Whitely was
supervising detention that day. Mr. Whitely had a beard and drove a
Volkswagen Beetle. Mr. Whitely was . . . different. Normally, pupils in
detention were expected to knuckle down and get on with some course-
work. Mr. Whitely had other ideas. He would make you read for an hour.
You were not allowed to read the book of your choice, however; you had
to read the book of Mr. Whitely’s choice. The book he selected for me
had an image of two ladies in ball gowns on the cover. I laughed. I was four-
teen. I loved soccer and the Beatles. I couldn’t possibly read a book about
women in ball gowns. I pushed it away. Mr. Whitely pushed it back. He
tapped the cover. “Read,” he said, without saying anything at all.
One hour later, Mr. Whitely returned to tell me I could go home. I was
still reading. I was two pages from the end of a chapter. I asked Mr.
Whitely if I could stay another ten minutes. Mr. Whitely raised an

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eyebrow. He looked around the library, perhaps to make certain that
aliens had not invaded and replaced me with an exact book-loving rep-
lica. He said, “Take the book home and finish it.” I shook my head. My
friends would ridicule me if they saw me holding a book called . . . Pride
and Prejudice. But Mr. Whitely was persuasive. So I took the book home
and read it under the bedcovers, by flashlight. I enjoyed it. And when I
returned it a week later, Mr. Whitely introduced me to more books,
including one that would change my life. It was called The Hobbit. It had
a dragon on the cover.
When people ask, “What’s the best thing about being an author?” I tell
them the story of Mr. Whitely, and how he opened a door in me that led
to a world of infinite adventures, a door I’ve been striving to open for
others ever since I began writing stories. Perhaps this is best summed up
by a poignant letter I received years ago, from a mom who’d been reading
The Fire Within with her son. She wrote, “My son is profoundly dyslexic.
Until we found your book, he would not voluntarily read a menu! But
because he was so caught up in the mystery, this is the first book he has
attempted to read by himself. That is a miracle for him. Thank you.” No,
Mom. Thank Mr. Whitely. I think he would have been proud.

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21. Reading shows you the woods and
helps you through

by Jennifer Donnelly

When I was eight years old, I wanted the truth.


About life. People. The world.
But the grown-ups wouldn’t give it to me.
Mr. Rogers didn’t. Neither did Bert and Ernie, my parents, or my
teachers. The nuns didn’t. Nor did Scooby-Doo, Count Chocula, or
President Nixon.
I wanted to know why Christmas carols made me feel sad. Why my
tough-as-nails state trooper father sometimes cried. Why M&M’s did
melt in my hand.
Grown-ups think kids can’t handle the truth. They want kids to feel
safe and protected. To be happy. That’s why they invented Batman and
Santa and Cap’n Crunch. To show that things are fine, that someone’s in
charge and he’s handing out prizes.
But kids sense there’s more to the story. At night, lying on my stomach
on the living room floor with my coloring books, I would listen as the
somber voices on the television told my parents about Vietnam, Attica,
Watergate.
I didn’t understand body counts. Riots and tear gas. Or a president
who lied. And no one explained them to me. The grown-ups were busy
and tired and impatient. Now that I am one, I know they were also afraid.
And then, on a weekly trip to the library, I discovered a copy of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales and everything changed.
The Brothers Grimm were story collectors. They traveled around
Germany, listened to folktales and fairy tales, and wrote down what they
heard. And what they heard wasn’t always pretty. Because life wasn’t
always pretty.

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In the Grimms’ version of “Hansel and Gretel,” the kids don’t just get
lost in the woods. Their father abandons them there. Because their step-
mother tells him to. They are poor and don’t have enough to eat and if
they can get rid of the kids, well . . . that’s two less mouths to feed.
In the Grimms’ “Cinderella,” the ugly stepsisters are so desperate to
marry the prince, they cut off pieces of their feet to fit into the glass slip-
per. They’re ugly, we’re told. What choice do they have?
I loved these stories. I still do. Because in them, the Grimms acknowl-
edge something profound and essential—that the woods are real, and
dark, and full of wolves. That I will, at times, get hopelessly lost in them.
But they told me something else, too—that I can beat that darkness.
Gretel was just a kid, but she beat the witch. Jack outran the giant. Red
Riding Hood escaped from the wolf.
The brothers showed me that I am all I need, that I have all I need, to
get out of the woods and find my way home. In their wild, weird, and
wonderful fairy tales, I finally found the truth.

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22. Reading lets you go to places and see things
you never would or could

by Jenny Downham

I grew up in a house without books. My parents, both from working-class


backgrounds, left school at fourteen and thought reading wasn’t for peo-
ple “like them.”
I discovered stories at school. The teacher would read to the class at
the end of each day, and on Friday, in assembly, the principal read to the
entire school. But we weren’t allowed to take books home and the nearest
library was a long bus ride away.
When I was six, my cousin gave me a battered anthology he’d out-
grown. It was called Favourite Poems to Read Aloud. I took this as an
instruction and recited them constantly. I imagine this annoyed my
mother, because for my next birthday I was given two books of my own:
Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Legends from Ancient Greece. “At least they’ll
keep you quiet,” she said.
They utterly transported me. I’d never realized that could happen.
They took me away from home and put me in other places. Not safe
places, either. Scary and dangerous ones full of lost children and wicked
adults and buckets of blood! There were no gauzy-winged fairies in
Grimm, despite the title. As for ancient Greece—Pandora daring to dis-
obey the gods and open the box entrusted to her care was the most
terrifying and exciting story I’d ever read.
At mealtimes, I’d put my books down and force myself to journey
home. I’d look at my family over the dinner table and think, You’ve no
idea where I’ve been . . .
It wasn’t until I went to a secondary school with a wonderful library
that books became readily accessible. It was here that I borrowed Robert
C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah, a story about the end of the world. There’s
one survivor—a sixteen-year-old girl called Ann, who manages to keep

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living with grace and wisdom. I loved that book. It wasn’t that I wanted
to be Ann. I really didn’t. But I wanted to know that she was possible—
someone like her. She made me feel brave. Perhaps I was also capable of
being such a person?
And here is my reason for reading—books let you go to places and see
things you never would or could, or perhaps would want to in real life.
You can meet protagonists who are able to tap into their own intelligence
and resourcefulness. They might mess up, as we all do. They might go
down the wrong path, or make terrible decisions, or feel afraid. They
might have to ask advice or seek practical help, but you can watch them
stumble and pick themselves up again and, as they grow and learn, so
will you, walking beside them.
I feel sad that my mum never read a book in her life, never turned to a
book for comfort or escape or guidance. But I feel blessed that she
encouraged me to read, despite not understanding what I gained from it.
I explored safely, Mum, that’s what. I received manageable doses of
terror that produced antibodies (rather like a vaccine) to help me fight
real-life fears.
Books are an easily accessible, extraordinary, and valuable resource.
The story inside might give you strength, make you laugh, move you,
make you think, feed you, stimulate your curiosity, and encourage you to
ask questions of the world. It might scare you too, of course. But what if
that gives you the courage to deal with a real-life challenge?
So, pick up a book—borrow one if you don’t have any of your own—
and begin a journey today.

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23. Reading is a beautiful, scientific mystery

by Julie Falatko

When I talk to students about writing, I tell them that the process of being
a writer is the same for me as it is for them. I struggle to get my ideas to
be as great on the page as they are in my head. And then I revise. A lot.
All of that is true, but what I don’t say is: I still don’t get how it works.
I am a writer. That’s my actual job. But I don’t know how writing and
reading actually WORK. It’s a scientific mystery.
I think of a scene. I write it down. And somehow, by doing that, a
reader who is hundreds of miles away from me can see that scene I made
up in their own head.
I can write a joke in my house in Maine and make someone in Texas
laugh.
A book is flat letters on a page. The letters don’t move. They don’t
dance or sing. But reading a book can make me smile. How? Do those
marks on the pages transmit humor waves through the air into my brain
and activate my smile muscles? It’s probably that the ink in the letters
diffuses ambient hilarity molecules into my brain hemispheres. Or maybe
that the words pile into microscopic telepathic image transmission
ships that fly into my ears.
Definitely one of those.
It has to be, because how else can some paper sewn into a cardboard
cover make me smile if I’m reading out in public? That’s amazing!
I remember the first book that made me cry, Bridge to Terabithia by
Katherine Paterson. How dare this book make my cry? I couldn’t believe
it. But it did.
A book can let you literally read someone else’s mind, because authors
take things from their heads and write them down for you. All those
words in books are describing someone else’s thoughts. And if you read
a lot of books, you’re getting a lot of practice reading other people’s

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minds (it’s a scientific fact!). Maybe reading helps you read everyone’s
thoughts, not just the ones written down in books. I’m reading hundreds
of books so I’ll be able to read people’s brains. I’ll let you know how
it goes.
I’m going to keep writing, and I’m going to keep reading. It’s fun. But
also, if I keep it up, one of these days I might crack the science of how
squiggles can transform from words into feelings in my brain. I think it’s
either metamorphosis, photosynthesis, or magic.

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24. Reading is a tool of freedom

by Sharon G. Flake

My great-grandmother didn’t have much schooling. But she loved to read


the Bible, and she loved her grandchildren. “Read anything—even if it’s
a comic book,” she told them. My father took her wisdom to heart. As a
result, we grew up in a home where reading wasn’t just a priority. It was
something done out of love.
Dad only made it to the eighth grade. At fifteen, he traveled north in
the Colored section of the train along with his cousin and his grand-
mother’s wisdom. He carried a cardboard suitcase. The fifty dollars in
his pocket came from working construction at an army camp in North
Carolina. He never formally furthered his education. But to this day, he
is one of the most well-informed people I’ve ever known. If I want to
know about World War l, I call Dad. If I’m curious about which president
ran against whom and when—I dial my father up. He’s ninety-three now
and his memory isn’t as sharp, but he’s still my go-to person for historical
events, geographical wonders, and politics—local, national, and
international.
Mom and Dad devoured newspapers. My five siblings and I can still
recall running around the corner to the store to buy the Daily News. Back
then, papers were as thick as hoagies. The Sunday paper was super
wide as couch cushions. Our parents read the newspaper each day, from
cover to cover. Midweek they purchased and read the African American
newspaper—the Tribune. The papers went into the trash only after every
word and idea had been gleaned and digested, it seemed.
My parents showed us by example that there was something important
between those pages. I read about the Vietnam War, Martin’s marches,
Rizzo’s raids. Sitting at the supper table, all eight of us would share our
views about our community and the world. This was no quiet affair. We
did a poor job at taking turns or listening to one another. Us kids

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especially were too filled up with what we’d read in the papers or learned
from the evening news the night before to be polite.
We never heard our great-grandmother utter her infamous words. But
we lived them nonetheless. My sister became a voracious reader. She
loved high fashion magazines, the classics. Later in life, after traveling
the world, she worked as a hospital aide. She’d find old copies of the
Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, and read them during her
break. Doctors and strangers, she told us later, would stare as if she and
those publications didn’t match up. But my sister was doing exactly what
she was raised to do—reading anything and everything that suited her
fancy.
I wasn’t like my sister or dad when it came to reading. I enjoyed read-
ing. But I loved television. Still, I spent a fair share of time in libraries,
toting home piles of books. Once, I borrowed one from a friend. Reading
the evening away in a tub, I dropped the book in the water. Alone in the
house, I placed it dripping wet into a hot oven. My hope was to restore it
to its original state. But the pages curled and browned. The glue that held
it together melted. Embarrassed, I paid my friend for the novel. I do not
recall borrowing any more books from her. But the pleasure I get from
reading remains. My great-grandmother’s words do as well: “Read
anything— even if it’s a comic book.” If we give young people this sort of
freedom, perhaps they will exceed the limitations the world most surely
will impose on them. Armed with such a tool, they too will discover new
worlds, set their sights on whichever mountains they wish—and fly.

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25. Reading gets you into the club

by Aimee Friedman

I still remember that day. I was in the fourth grade, waiting in line in the
school cafeteria, when I overheard two students raving about a book
series they loved called the Baby-sitters Club. It was about a group
of girls who ran their own baby-sitting business, and all the dramas
and victories that ensued. My ears perked up; I was a voracious reader, and
always searching for new books to consume.
That evening, with my mom’s blessing, I ordered the latest title in the
Baby-sitters Club series—#15: Little Miss Stonybrook . . . and Dawn—
off my Scholastic Book Club flyer. When the book arrived, with its bright
and appealing illustrated cover, I dove in right away. And I was hooked.
As soon as I finished, I ran to the library, and the bookstore, and any-
where I could get my hands on books 1–14. I caught up, and then waited
breathlessly for the next installment.
Most of the novels I had read before were period pieces, or fantasies,
or somber “classics” that my parents or teachers pressed on me. Nothing
quite hit me where I lived like the Baby-sitters Club. The author, Ann M.
Martin, wrote in a warm, familiar style that made the characters feel as
real as any kids I knew. Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, Mary Anne, and Dawn
talked and laughed and fought and dressed and dreamed just like my
friends and I did. They dealt with homework and crushes and family
strife. And I loved that they were, on balance, kind to each other. In my
own life, and in some of the contemporary fiction I had read, a fair
amount of cruelty between girls was somehow celebrated. What a gift it
was to see young women being supportive of each other, and working
their way through disagreements with empathy. There was conflict, to be
sure—any good story will have that—and never any sort of preachy mes-
saging (kids are allergic to such things). But ultimately the books
provided a safe, cozy haven where friendship and sisterhood won the day.

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Reading and writing were always my havens—my favorite activities,
my constant companions. Like so many writers, I was a shy and sensitive
kid, and I sought solace in stories. I’d been writing stories ever since I
could write—around age five—but I began writing in earnest, filling up
notebook after notebook, around the time I started reading the Baby-
sitters Club. I think those books gave me the freedom—the permission—to
write about the day-to-day lives of girls who might not have superpowers
or wield swords, but instead worried about school and friends, and found
empowerment through chasing their passions.
Without the Baby-sitters Club, I don’t think I’d be the person (let alone
the reader, writer, and editor) I am now. Does that sound like an exag-
geration? Ask the countless BSC fans—both of my generation, and the
readers still discovering the series today—and you’ll find many who feel
the same, and share their love for the books via articles and podcasts and
adaptations. We’ve become our own club, and the bond we share is proof
positive of just how powerful and inspiring books can be. BSC forever!

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26. Reading is chocolate

by Cornelia Funke

We all, writers of stories, makers of books, know that not everyone likes
to read them. In fact, most people don’t—as so often books are forced on
children like some kind of medicine, and we all know how that tastes!
Read this and you’ll be a better person. Read this and you’ll develop
your writing skills. Read this and you’ll get better grades.
Those of us who are lucky enough to love books nevertheless know of
course that the medicine part should be ignored. No grown-up would
walk into a bookstore and say: Can you please suggest a book that makes
me a better person? Or educates me on some painful truths?
No.
We don’t love books because they’re good for us. (Although I do
believe they are.) We love them because they can taste like chocolate, like
foreign spices we never tasted before. We love them because they take us
through magical wardrobes and to foreign planets. We love them because
they open doors and windows when our world seems so small and gray.
And those that are really good make us see that world far more clearly, in
bright colors, all its mysteries and magic revealed.
Books make us into shape-shifters. They teach us to walk in some-
body else’s shoes and teach us how it feels to be hungry, happy, angry,
tired, so afraid that we can barely move, so sad that we drown in our own
tears . . . They teach us that it doesn’t matter what color our skin has,
whether we’re boys or girls. They give us words for what we feel—when
we believe that no one else feels that way! Books give us companions
who understand when nobody else does, printed friends who are like us,
when everyone seems so different.
Sometimes they even give us wings, the scales of a fish, the legs of a
spider, or they show us how it may feel to be a tree. They can make us
understand that life comes in many shapes on this planet and that we

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don’t have to fear someone just because they look or talk different—or
have fur.
And the adventures! All the dangers we dare to confront between the
safe pages of a book. We still feel that courage when we put it back on a
shelf, the strength it gave us to travel with its words. We can die and meet the
death of others in a book. It can prepare us for all the hardship this life
throws at us. And it is wonderful to meet loss or grief or heartbreak with
the thought: hm, I remember when Hermione was jealous of Ron’s girl-
friend. I remember when that boy’s best friend died . . . what was his
name? Sometimes we may forget the title and the author of a book, but we
won’t forget how it made us feel. I’ve heard from dying children that they
rode my dragons facing death; I heard from a female soldier that Inkdeath
helped her survive a war. I heard from a girl who never had a family that
she found one reading about the children in Thief Lord.
Yes. It’s a magical task to write books. For they are printed shelters
from the storm. And at the same time they hold all the words that do
explain the storm.
So no! Don’t ever sell them as medicine. They’re chocolate. The best
and richest chocolate in the world.

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27. Reading gives you unexpected new friends

by Eric Gansworth

If you were born at the Tuscarora Indian Nation after 1900, you likely
wouldn’t have a loving relationship with books. I suspect this is true on
many reservations. Books were associated with school, which terribly
echoed the US government’s systematic attempt to erase indigenous cul-
tures: the Indian Boarding Schools. Many reservation households did not
own books. Mostly, I saw books on library shelves, lining the lunchroom
walls in our school.
In kindergarten, I enjoyed reading comics and monster magazines,
but knew I was missing jokes aimed at an older audience. I mastered
schoolbooks to improve my magazine comprehension skills. By third
grade, I was placed with the fourth grade for reading period, and our
assigned book was John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. The novel, set on a
ranch, featured cowboys as major players. Though cowboys were scarce
in upstate New York, where my reservation exists, I knew what they
were. Tension between “cowboys and Indians” was a mainstay on TV, in
movies, cartoons. In those places, Indians represented danger for the
hero trailblazing cowboys. I wasn’t eager to read this book that might
paint me as a deterrent to “progress.”
The complex style immediately attracted me and I began reading
toward improving my skills. By the end of the second page, I’d glimpsed
the cowboy Billy Buck and his world as a live-in ranch hand. Though
connected intimately to his employers, the Tiflins, Billy actively dis-
played his employee status at all times. He was dressed, waiting, before
Mrs. Tiflin rang the breakfast bell, but couldn’t enter and join the meal
until family members were ready. Young readers were supposed to iden-
tify with Jody, the adolescent main character, but I was drawn to Billy
Buck’s familiar practiced subservient position. I knew how to behave like
him. My mother cleaned the houses of white people in the tony “village”

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near the reservation, and if I went along, I had to perform “subservient
kid” behaviors so the homeowners felt safe with my presence.
I was fascinated witnessing the same dynamic playing out among
these white characters. I wanted to inhabit their world, desperately longed
to ask Billy Buck what his life was like. Because of my mother’s jobs, I’d
understood that white people around us considered us “lesser,” but on the
Rez, we had each other, a community. I wondered how Billy Buck navi-
gated being “lesser” among his own. It never even occurred to me that I
should question why we existed in that place. I’d been prone to empathy
from a very early age, for animals, people, and TV characters—more
than was acceptable, truthfully. I tried to share the good news about the
magic of books and the characters you could grow to love. I told a sibling
I wanted to meet Billy Buck.
“Don’t say ridiculous things like that out loud! People already think
you’re too weird,” my sibling said. The walled-off emotional states the
boarding schools had instilled in us through our grandparents rose up
and punched me in the face again. You learned quickly what not to do
when it flared. We lived in a hard world and I’d already learned how to
thrive inside my head.
I was sad I didn’t have the skills to share this joy, but fortunately, read-
ing is a quiet, private activity I could enjoy on my own. I discovered that
books offered alternative worlds, sometimes worlds as harsh as mine,
where things were never as simple as they seemed. That understanding
made my own life less lonely and set me on the lifelong path to a world
lined with books, each filled with another potential friend.

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28. Reading works on your mind

by Lamar Giles

My mom had a plan.


See, she was a factory employee in a factory town, happy to have the
work. But she’d be the first to tell you it was hard physical labor done
around really dangerous machinery. Safety regulations didn’t mean she
was safe. At all. Even if you avoided daily injuries (like she mostly did),
long-term effects on the body were inevitable. Life in “the plant” was not
the sort she wanted for her children. Often, she’d tell me and my sister,
“Work on your mind, because if you work on your mind when it’s your
turn to go out into the world and make a living for yourself, at the very
least you can have air-conditioning.”
How does one work on their mind? According to Mom, books. My
sister and I would argue the answer was toys, but we lost that one more
often than not. Shopping trips became this compromise (or bribe, depend-
ing on how you looked at it) where we were definitely not getting a toy,
BUT if we found a book we wanted, we could have it. Every time.
There were some problems with this approach. Those trips were often
to the meager grocery store in our factory town, where the book section
was five shelves the width of a refrigerator. The children’s books that
were available weren’t the most appealing, yet, since books were the only
option for acquisition, I was determined to always find something I could
take home. This was the reason I read Misery by Stephen King around
age eight (not recommended).
The other problem: Having set the precedent of always saying yes to a
book, shopping trips became more expensive in a way Mom hadn’t antic-
ipated. She couldn’t retract the offer—that wouldn’t be encouraging the
sharpening of our minds, now would it?—but she couldn’t go broke over
it, either. The most obvious solution presented itself in the squat brick
building a block away from the grocery store: the public library.

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We could still take books home (albeit temporarily) but we were no
longer limited by the paltry selection of a store that specialized in quality
cuts of meat. We could check out something like twenty books if we
wanted. For free (provided we returned them before the due date). There
was a whole children’s section . . . though I still checked out books way
beyond my years. I read The Dark Half by Stephen King at age nine
(again, not recommended). And while toys still held some appeal—I was
a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles guy—our tastes began to skew toward
the unique portal magic that only books provided. Time travel and space
adventures through science fiction. The magical kingdoms of fantasy.
Mom’s plan worked—and as we know, history repeats itself.
My sister’s got her son, my nephew, on the same always-say-yes-to-a-
book plan. I write books, so my words are making it to the hands of eager
kids working on their minds. Mom made a lot of things in that factory,
but outside it was where she forged her rarest creations: a couple of read-
ers. Now we’re self-replicating!

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29. Reading can give you words to help you know
and name yourself

by Alex Gino

I first read the word genderqueer in Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaws:


On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us when I was nineteen. Finding a word
to describe people who don’t connect with either the gender they were
assigned at birth or the “opposite” gender was like finding out I existed.
I consumed the word and concept that I had been needing for so long like
I’d had a vitamin deficiency. I ate it right up, nom nom nom. It became
part of my bones and my flesh, and with it, I was able to better piece
together who I was and am.
While I was delighted to find myself in Auntie Kate’s words, and my
endless thanks to her for that, I was indignant that no one had ever both-
ered to tell me there was a rest of us before, those of us who aren’t male
or female. Of course, they most likely didn’t know themselves. I love
reading because it can help us figure out who we are, even when the
people around us won’t or can’t. The people and ideas we read about can
be models for our own lives that we haven’t found elsewhere.
This is especially important for young LGBTQIAP+ (Lesbian Gay
Bisexual Transgender Queer Intersex Asexual Pansexual +) folks, who
are often the only queer and/or trans person (that they know of) in their
family. And while more kids are coming out, there are still plenty of
young folk who don’t have queer or trans friends (again, that they know
of). Without queer and trans elders and peers, reflections are rare. Books
are a way that we know our feelings are real—that we are real. And that’s
not at all limited to nonfiction. Fiction is a wealth of opportunity for
reflections. The characters and events may not be factual, but they ring
with truth and connection, and reading about people like us can help us
feel real ourselves.

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I’ve heard from kids (and adults) who tell me that Melissa, the main
character of my book George, is the first trans person that they’ve ever
known, outside of themselves. I’m reminded in particular of a young per-
son who I met twice. The first time was when she first held Melissa’s
story. The second time, she asked me to sign a copy to her new name. In
those six months, she met Melissa and was able to come out as trans and
name herself. I can’t imagine my words having a more important effect
on a person.
Of course, books aren’t the only way LGBTQIAP+ kids and other
marginalized folks find connection. More and more young queer and
trans kids have queer and trans friends and peers, and rainbow alliance–
type groups are becoming more common in high schools, middle schools,
and, yes, elementary schools. I am heartened by the knowledge that kids
like I was are now seeing themselves as a part of literature, and thus, a
part of society. For those kids, sharing and talking about queer books and
stories is an invaluable bonding experience and an opportunity to explore
what connects us as well as what makes us unique.
Note that I use the word genderqueer above. In the story of my life,
that’s the word where I feel most at home. If I were reading what’s avail-
able today, I might well have connected with the word nonbinary. The
fact that we each have our own reaction to what we read, based on who
we are and what we’ve faced, is just another thing to love about reading.
Particularly in queer communities, language is rapidly morphing as we
grow in response to long-denied freedoms. And I’m excited to keep read-
ing to learn language and concepts that account for who we are and where
we’re going.

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30. Reading builds bridges

by Christina Diaz Gonzalez

Books as bridges. It wasn’t something I’d often considered, but as I think


more on the topic, I see how books have often been an important connec-
tion in introducing me to new people or places. When I was young, books
were a link that could transport me to fantastic faraway lands or provide
me with a hidden insight into a story that hit closer to home. Books were
my companions, and I took them everywhere. I especially remember sit-
ting in my tree house, reading and getting lost in stories filled with action
and adventure. Hours would go by and yet time seemed to stand still.
Perhaps this fragmenting of time and place made books such as A
Wrinkle in Time such a clear favorite for a young Latina girl growing up
in the Deep South. I loved the chance to explore new worlds and meet
new people, which in turn gave me the opportunity to learn more about
myself within the safety of the pages of the book. Being an avid reader
prompted me to search for stories that might reflect my own experience
of living a bicultural life, but, unfortunately, finding those types of books
was nearly an impossible task during that time. Thankfully, today’s read-
ers have more (but not nearly enough) diverse books, which are
exceptionally important, as they not only serve to validate diverse expe-
riences, but they also allow a reader to see the familiar inside the foreign.
It is this power found within books that gives us insight into another’s
experience.
And this power found in reading can also create a special link between
books and our own memories by establishing a bridge that can transcend
time itself. When that connection is formed, a book ceases to be an inani-
mate object sitting on a shelf and instead becomes part of who we are. For
me, this happens when I allow myself to think back to a favorite moment,
such as the days I spent reading to my grandmother. If I close my eyes, I
can travel back through time to when I was a young girl and I would be

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sitting in her room, on her flowered bedspread, where she would ask me
to read Spanish magazines to her. I remember being amazed at stories of
royal families living in Europe and comparing them to the fairy tales I
had read in English. In retrospect, it was all an obvious plot by my abuela
to ensure that I learned how to read in Spanish, but there was also some-
thing quite magical about sharing those moments reading together. It was
a connection between cultures, between generations, and between lan-
guages. Even now, after so many years have passed, whenever I see those
Spanish magazines, a bridge seems to cross over the chasm of time, and
I’m able to briefly relive those moments with my abuela once again.
So, I ask you to cross your own divide and think of those favorite
books or reading moments as vehicles that can help take you to a differ-
ent time and place. Consider the real-life people who played a part in
your own reading adventures . . . an encouraging teacher, a comforting
parent reading to you at bedtime, or perhaps your own abuelita who lov-
ingly gazed at you as you mangled several words in another language . . .
these are the people who you can revisit, even if only as a memory, when
books become imprinted in your heart and mind. You see, books can
truly be the most magical of bridges.

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31. Reading takes you and your fears seriously

by Alan Gratz

When I was a kid, I was terrified of dying.


I was afraid of dying in a general sense: I didn’t want to be gone for-
ever from the world. I really, really liked life (I still do!) and I didn’t want
to not be living anymore. Call it the world’s biggest case of FOMO ever.
But I was also specifically afraid of dying while I was asleep. I was so
afraid of dying in my sleep that I would stay awake as long as I could
every night. My parents would come into my room and say, “Alan, go to
sleep!” I would say, “I can’t! I’m afraid I’ll die while I’m sleeping!” and
my parents would say, “You’re not going to die. Go to sleep.” My parents
didn’t understand. It may have been very silly to think I was going to die
in my sleep, but to me, at age eight, nine, ten, the fear was very real.
I was scared to death of dying.
Then, in seventh grade, my class read a book called Tuck Everlasting
by Natalie Babbitt. In Tuck Everlasting, a family drinks from a magic
spring and lives forever. They never die.
It sounded great to me. I didn’t ever want to die! I wanted to live for-
ever! But the Tucks come to realize that maybe living forever isn’t such a
good thing after all. At its heart, Tuck Everlasting is about how growing
old and dying is a natural and essential part of the cycle of life.
I was stunned. Here was a book written for kids my age—in seventh
grade!—that fixated on death as much as I did. That said to me, “I get it.
Death is scary. Let’s talk about it.” Tuck Everlasting didn’t change my
mind about death. When I was done reading it, I still wanted to live for-
ever. But for the first time, I felt like an adult was taking me and my very
real, very specific fears seriously. I felt seen.
When I became an author, I wanted to write books that did the same
thing. All my books are exciting, fast reads, but they tackle tough stuff
too. Prisoner B-3087 is a hard, honest look at what life was like for a boy

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in the Holocaust. Code of Honor shows how people of Middle Eastern
descent experience prejudice in the United States post-9/11. Projekt 1065
examines what it takes for a kid who was bullied to become a bully him-
self. Refugee shows the difficult, dangerous journey refugees face when
they are driven from their homes by violence. Grenade examines the
horrors of war, particularly for the people caught in the middle. Allies
asks how we can continue to discriminate against people who aren’t like
us when it is so very clear that we can get more done and be stronger and
better when we work together.
I write about tough stuff because I know, like Natalie Babbitt did, that
young readers can handle it. I know you have questions about the world,
about life, just like I did, and I want to talk about those things as honestly
and thoughtfully as she did. I may not have all the answers—and even if
I think I do, I may not change your mind. But I will always write books
that take you seriously. I promise.
Oh, and I still don’t want to die. If you’re reading this, and think some-
day you might become a medical researcher who cures death, I would
appreciate you getting on that sooner rather than later.

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32. Reading gives you an escape . . . and a home

by Melissa Grey

There’s a phrase in Latin that literally means “go with me.” Vade mecum.
It refers to that one book you can’t live without. That one book that “goes
with you.” Growing up, that book for me was From the Mixed-Up Files
of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I carried my dingy, dog-eared copy with me
everywhere. Between its pages, I both lost and found myself.
You see, I had an unhappy childhood. My home never quite felt like
a safe space. So reading about children who made their own home in a
place as magical as the Metropolitan Museum of Art was inspirational to
me. I formed all these grand plans about doing what Claudia and Jamie
Kincaid did; I would save up all the loose change I could scrounge up in
my couch cushions and make my own life somewhere else. I even lived
in New York City! The Metropolitan Museum was right there!
But sadly, on a school trip to that very same museum, I found that the
Met, with its security guards and all-seeing cameras, wasn’t nearly as
receptive to overnight guests as E.L. Konigsburg would have me believe.
I would never pluck spare change out of the fountain to do my laundry
and buy vending machine dinners. I would never sleep in Napoleon III’s
bed. I learned that life could not always imitate art. I couldn’t escape my
life the way the Kincaid children had. But what the book did teach me
was that I could escape. It was just a different kind of escape, unlimited
by the constraints of reality.
Books were my escape.
And I wasn’t limited to just one. Every book was its own world, its
own universe. Each one had its own rules and brave heroes breaking
those rules. I could lose myself in Tolkien’s Middle-earth or Mercedes
Lackey’s Valdemar or J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts. Fiction made all things
possible. And if those incredible authors could create such vivid and
wonderful worlds . . . then maybe I could too.

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I knew then that my vade mecum—the book that “went with me”
always—hadn’t led me astray. It had led me home.
While I couldn’t live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I basically
did live in an equally important institution: the library. (Though they didn’t
let me sleep there either.) And no library had a greater impact on me than
the New York Public Library’s main branch on Fifth Avenue. It’s a beau-
tiful old building guarded by two majestic stone lions. It is grand and
opulent and full of the most important things in my world: books. This
was where I belonged. And this was where I would write my first book
(and where the heroine of that book would live as a runaway child).
And now, every time I sit down to write a new book, I remember the
way From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler made me
feel. And if I manage to make even one reader feel that way, then I’ll
know I’ve done what I’ve set out to do.

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33. Reading is of enormous importance

by Virginia Hamilton

Literature, like justice, begins on a simple, human level. Such as paying


attention, listening, answering questions, seeing the problems, and sens-
ing that our understanding, our kindness, serves a good purpose.
I had a friend, Danny, who some years ago was in elementary school
with my son. Danny was very proud of me. He didn’t know much about
my relationship to the world, but in my hometown I received a lot of
attention, and he knew I must be somebody. Since he was in class with
my son, Jaime, and they were friends, then he was somebody, too. Danny
would sometimes come home with Jaime and he would take time to visit
with me. Clearly I had become one of his favorite attractions—the some-
body. But then I believe his concept of me changed, to puzzled curiosity
about what I did, the making of books. We talked about that one day.
I told him that a book had to have a start and a finish. And in between,
there had to be something going on, something that would hold the
reader there inside the book. “You have to mess around in there and keep
things going,” I told him.
“You mean like a fight?” he asked.
“Maybe a fight,” I answered. “At least, you have to have folks doing
things that get them upset and confused and maybe trying things out on
one another sometimes.”
“You can do that?” Danny wanted to know.
“I can do anything I want to the folks in my books,” I said, “and
nobody can stop me.”
Well, he thought about that. “You’re the boss in there,” he said. I could
tell he liked that. But I was aware he wanted to ask me something very
important to him and was having a hard time. Danny stared at me a long
time before he finally blurted it out: “But where do you get all those dif-
ferent words?” he asked. Well, I was speechless for a moment before I

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realized that Danny probably had never read a book. And he thought a
book was full of words, no two of which were the same. Think of that;
think of the fear in Danny, defeating himself, creating failure before he’d
even started.
I informed him that I used almost all the same words over and over
again in every book. “I don’t learn a whole volume of new words each
time I write,” I said. “For example,” I told him, “I use the, is, it, he, she,
open, close, inside, outside, grass, car, tree, sky hundreds of times in
books. I only know a certain number of words.”
Telling him that seemed to make things a lot easier for him.
But isn’t it curious what young people imagine when they are afraid?
And yet, although my young friend wasn’t a reader, somewhere along the
way he understood the importance of books and reading.
I talk to many young people in and outside of this country, young
people from age seven or eight to sixteen and seventeen, and I have never
spoken to one of any age who did not know somewhere inside that books
and reading and writing were of enormous importance. Even those who
weren’t readers knew how important reading was.

This selection was adapted from Virginia Hamilton’s 1990 commence-


ment address at Bank Street College. © 2020 The Arnold Adoff Revocable
Living Trust. Used By Permission.

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34. Reading will keep you company

by Karen Hesse

In 1961 I ran away from home. I was nine years old. I was certain my
parents didn’t love me, and I needed to figure out how to proceed with the
rest of my life. The place I ran to was my local library, a favorite destina-
tion for as long as I could remember. I loved my neighborhood library; I
felt safe there.
I’d never come on my own before. Usually my brother walked me
there.
Unaccompanied, in that big, light-filled building, I felt very small and
vulnerable, but also very grown-up and powerful.
My plan was to stay at the library for the rest of my life. There was a
bathroom where I could wash up. I didn’t eat much so I didn’t worry
about food. And there were books, enough books to last a lifetime.
When I didn’t show up for dinner that evening, my mother sent my
brother out looking for me.
It didn’t take him long to find me.
I rejoiced at seeing him when he first joined me at the round library
table.
But then he spoke.
“You are in big trouble,” he said.
“I don’t care,” I told him. “I’m never going home.”
My brother was sympathetic but firm.
I was stubborn but also a little scared.
The library was preparing to close for the day. The children’s librar-
ian, who I adored, had been monitoring my presence all afternoon and
was too wise to be fooled if I’d tried ducking into the bathroom to hide
until the doors were locked.
So I finally swallowed my pride and allowed my brother to lead me
out the big glass doors and back home.

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I’d entered the library hours earlier, empty-handed, carrying with me
only my seething temper.
I departed the library with an armful of newly borrowed books.
Ever since cracking the reading code in first grade, I’d discovered that
reading, more than most anything else, filled me with delight and won-
der, challenged me to think, and feel, and grow. To walk in other people’s
shoes. Books helped me escape a difficult childhood made even more
difficult by my own pigheaded, prickly self. The isolation I felt in my
heart was temporarily eased by the companions I traveled with in books.
I had problems. They had problems. I read carefully to see how their
dilemmas resolved. Then I integrated their experiences into my own. It
took me years to develop a personal ethic unique to me. In the meantime
I took inspiration from fictional (and occasionally real) characters.
I don’t remember what happened to me when my brother and I returned
home that evening. I don’t think I got dinner that night. But I didn’t eat
much anyway, so that didn’t feel like too great a punishment.
I’m pretty sure I was sent straight to my room.
But I had a stack of newly borrowed library books under my arm; a
crowd of new friends waiting to keep me company. They would help me
figure things out.

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35. Reading gives you unexpected role models

by Tanuja Desai Hidier

Once upon a town


(1970s; Snow White)
American Dream–bound
Brown family arrives

Mom-ji hums Hindi songs


Lures fairies Aai paree
Saris stash starlight
Shelved beneath Levi jeans

BapuDad-ji prays in kitchen


Masala-brewing tea
Cupboard temples Lord Krishna
(Of its door relieved)

Children curl up in cursive


(Fingers stained PBJ)
Blue airmail miss you missives
From/to Grandpamas/Bombay

Lovingly these Little Housers


Look upon each other
But on TV screen, bookshelf, street?
Look unlike any other . . .

Recess stress: the girl ducks


Strenuously does not cry
Kevin her skin dog-doo dubbed
Flung sand into her eyes

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Cherokee? Apache-hee?
One adult even taunted
Notes passed twitch: Must be witch
Was she? trembled she, haunted

Powww!

Piercing her brown skin


Raw arrow of shame
(Blood red in her vein;
Bonedeep, we’re the same)

She begins to view brown


As embarrassing, dirt
A tincture of splintering
True hue of hurt

World wobbles, a puzzle


Her own map: in bits
India’s elephant-trunk triangle
Just doesn’t fit

Yet both severed parts


Beat in her heart
How to bring them together
And not fall apart?

Not “Indian” enough


Not “American” either
Census (brow lifts): Other
Here-or-there? Nor-n-neither

O! Somewhere a place

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Broke things go to grow whole?
She wonders—discovers . . .

YES!
Just down the road!

Its code word: library—


Wilbraham, Mass girl’s no fool:
T’was the Yellow Brick Road!
Super(wo)man’s booth!

20,000 Leagues
Deep in stories she dives
Out the LionWitchWardrobe
Into magical lives . . .

One day stumbling upon


Villa Villekulla
Where a wonderkid heroine
How-do-you-do’s her

Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade . . .


Longstocking
Aka: Pippi
(Who’ll provide a pep-talking)

Fiery braids sticking out


Either side of her head
Pippi lives in this magical house . . .
By herself!

Brown girl (black braids down)


Lost in the page, found

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Words swirling her worlds
Toward common ground

Pippi’s privy to plural


Heartlands on a map:
Sweden, Seven Seas
(And’s unafraid to own that)

She too for her difference:


Beleaguered, teased
Craycarroty hair
Freakfreckspeckled cheeks

Yet . . .

Never once does she doubt her self-


Love and -belief

To a shop clerk selling salve for


Freckles, to hide them
Pippi declares she loves them—
Requests one to multiply them!

Pippi stood up for herself


The child on the street
Aaray waah!—was she strong!
Could lift a horse from its feet

And she reached rightupoffathat page—


Lifted me
(As books do:
Into . . .
We)

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A persona pluttifikate
(Her term for times tables):
Grit + Wit incarnate
Willing x Able

Herself unabashedly
x Infinity
Larger-than-life-largessely
Pippi thumbs-up-decreed:

If I can be so =
So YOU can be

Who was I to certify


Brown dirt (as in dirty?)
When it was tawn-bronze-dawn . . .
Earth? (Nth-degree worthy?)

I too—like YOU!—could be
Hero of my story
Lift up others, me, you—in truth:
It’s my dharma, my duty!

I too could give more


Do utbest to ensure
Heroes in my home were
Seen in their bravery. Bounty. Beauty.

Years on I wrote an Indian-


American coming of age
Built my own Villa Villekulla
On and off the page . . .

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Pippi hearing me, cheering me on all the way.

You don’t have to fit labels


A box: us or them
Either/or. We’re much more:
Galoreiously and/and!

A hyphen’s not a border


It’s also a bridge
The power of our stories
Pauses not on the page

Born by you
Bounds to the world . . .
Transforms you—
And you: the universe!

We can imagine
Speak, hear, write
READ our dreams
Into being

On a bookshelf
Find our true selves
Happy ends
And beginnings

And in a Pippi Longstocking


Make a forever friend

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36.

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37. Reading helps us realize that
everyone’s story matters

by Deborah Hopkinson

If you were to meet me at an author visit, you’d probably notice right


away that I’m short. Very short. I think most third graders are taller.
Actually, it’s been that way since kindergarten. I was clumsy too. And
really, REALLY horrible at sports. Back then (a long time ago), all we did
for PE was play kickball on our asphalt school playground. Guess who
was always picked last?
To make matters worse, the thing I was good at seemed like the wrong
one: winning spelling bees. Once, after a classmate named David beat
me in a spelling bee, he fell right over in a pretend faint. SLAM! He made
everyone laugh and applaud. But no one wants to clap for the kid who
wins all the time.
Truth is, I spent most of my time in school feeling embarrassed, awk-
ward, and shy; I was unpopular and different. You can probably guess
what I’m about to say next: I turned to reading.
From the time I was in fourth grade, I read constantly. I loved being
transported by a story. But I also liked reading about real people and
events. And the more I read, the more curious I got.
As I grew up, I started to notice there weren’t many books about girls
or ordinary people in history. I lived in a historic town (Lowell,
Massachusetts), where in the 1800s girls and women had come from
farms to work in some of America’s first factories.
The deserted textile factories were still there, and I walked by them
every day on my way to high school. I wondered: What if I had lived back
then? What would it have been like to stand for fourteen hours a day run-
ning a loom? Would I have ever had a chance to read?
The stories of the Lowell mill girls weren’t in my history books.
Neither were the stories of enslaved people who’d been kidnapped and

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forced to work on cotton plantations in the South—the same cotton that
was made into cloth in Lowell factories. Where were their stories?
Those questions started a lifelong learning journey. Books have
helped me learn more about the past, along with talking with people,
visiting museums, and traveling to places to see history with my own
eyes. I’ve learned about the Titanic, World War II, the Holocaust, and the
lives of immigrants. Reading nonfiction has helped me connect with
people of the past, though I realize I can never truly know what their lives
were like.
Once, after I became a writer, I was invited back to my high school
and given an alumni award. In my speech, I quoted an immigrant factory
worker whose oral history I’d found. She had a tremendous, determined
spirit. Her story had moved me, and I included it in my Scholastic non-
fiction book Up Before Daybreak: Cotton and People in America—a book
that helped me answer some of the questions I’d had growing up.
When I finished, an elderly gentleman came up to me. “That woman
you talked about was my mother,” he said. “Thank you for sharing her
story with others.” (Today, visitors can also learn about the lives of fac-
tory workers at the Lowell National Historical Park.)
That’s what reading nonfiction does: It connects us.
I hope you will read true stories of the past—collect stories from your
family members. Don’t forget to write your own story too. Because
everyone’s story matters.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, even though I didn’t get taller,
things did get better. Today, whenever I’m not reading or writing, I’m
working out at the gym. But still no team sports.

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38. Reading introduces you to lifelong friends

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

The friends I remember best from my childhood lived strange, adventure-


filled lives. They suffered and fought but also danced before bonfires
beneath the light of twin moons, ran along the eternally sunlit inner curve
of a hollow planet, hunted dragons and learned swordcraft, and stood up
to evil even though sometimes—even for them—it wasn’t enough. Their
names were Vesper, Mary, Justice, Alanna, Sirius, Aerin, Elsha, Lyra and
Will, Meg and Charles Wallace, Anne, Kate, Sophie and Howl.*
They were funny and intrepid and sensible and brilliant and some-
times tremendously foolhardy. I loved them, fellow reader; I loved them
as fiercely as only one of our tribe can. I loved Mary Lennox, the sour
child who, after the destruction of her harsh, unloving home, is shipped
with perfect indifference to a new one. I marveled alongside her slow
awakening to the possibilities of magic in the everyday world. I wrote to
myself, Never stop believing in magic, Alaya. A desperate warning from
a trapped child to an adult she couldn’t imagine. I never did stop. How
could I? My friends held the magic for me, even when I was at my lowest.
Lyra and Will and Elsha told me you could fight for better worlds. Aerin
told me to push past bitterness and exhaustion, to keep trying for what I
knew I needed. Sophie and Kate taught me to plan (and encouraged me
to not let the clothes pile quite so high). Anne reminded me to write. My
books held that door open for me; eventually, they helped me escape. I

*From, in order: The Vesper Holly series by Lloyd Alexander, The Secret Garden by
Frances Hodgson Burnett, the Justice trilogy by Virginia Hamilton, the Lioness Quartet
by Tamora Pierce, Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, The Hero and the Crown by Robin
McKinley, Winter of Fire by Sherryl Jordan, the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip
Pullman, A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L’Engle, Anne of Green Gables by L. M.
Montgomery, The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope, and Howl’s Moving Castle by
Diana Wynne Jones.

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had friends outside my books, thankfully, but they never knew—I never
told them—all the worlds I had inside me.
As an adult, I am grateful to these childhood friends—though perhaps
I could never be so grateful as that child I was, painstakingly deciphering
alongside them a map of how to be her own hero. Now I can return to
those old, familiar friends, and they spring to life as vibrantly as ever.
They have not changed as I have, but that’s part of the joy. I see new fac-
ets of what made me love them. I recognize bits of my own history in
their disasters and their joys.
I am who I am today because these friends met me at the junction
between dry page and living imagination; they gave the gift of recogni-
tion, that light in the dark, to a girl who needed it—and yes, that is a
magic I will always believe in.

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39. Reading can give you the past, present,
and future

by Varian Johnson

When I was growing up, it often seemed like the only time I truly saw
books about kids like me was in February—during Black History Month.
While I relished the opportunity to pick up these books, I wasn’t always
happy with the choices, because they all seemed to be about slavery.
About civil rights. About the struggle—the burden—of being black.
Don’t get me wrong—these books are important. They have a vital
place in our collections, and in our homes. Kids—and adults—need to
read them. These books tell the story of those who have come before us.
But kids of color deserve a wide variety of stories. Serious books and
historical books . . . but also funny books. Adventures. Mysteries. Stories
where the boy with the brown skin saves the day, or the girl with the hijab
solves the case.
That is why I am so excited about the state of publishing today. There
are so many more book choices than when I was a kid. Today, we not only
get to revisit our past in books, but we get to experience the present—and
even the future! To not just exist in the book, but to be the hero. The star.
And isn’t that one of the most joyful things about reading a book . . .
being able to see ourselves today, and being able to see the person we
hope to be?

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40. Reading changes gravity

by Jess Keating

Every time I open a book, I think of gravity on the moon. Because of


gravity, the average African elephant weighs around 12,000 pounds here
on Earth. Blue whales are even heavier—in fact, blue whales are thought
to be the largest animal to have ever lived—at a whopping 130 tons or
more. (If you’re curious, that’s as much as 25 elephants!)
But on the moon? Gravity doesn’t play by the same rules. You could
take a one-hundred-pound bag of candy to the moon and it would only
weigh about seventeen pounds. Your heavy bag of candy would somehow
be easier to carry. It sounds impossible, doesn’t it? But it’s science. We
can use a fancy equation to explain why the moon’s gravity makes things
lighter.
That’s why I love reading: Just like the moon, reading changes grav-
ity. And by changing gravity, books let us do impossible things. All the
rules are broken, and suddenly we’re capable of carrying anything.
Does carrying everything you love sound impossible? It is. Except
when you read.
With books, you can carry anything that piques your curiosity—
whether it’s whales or bunnies or mockingjays or impossibly big red dogs
named Clifford. The world is yours! And the best part? Whatever you
read is yours for life. You get to keep it, tucked away safely in your heart
with everything else that has ever mattered to you. When you read, there
is no limit to what you can carry. The rules of gravity no longer matter.
Instead, magic takes their place.
Because, dear reader—reading is magic. There is no equation or cal-
culation I can show you that explains how we can carry with us every
book we’ve ever loved. Whether it’s a story, a beloved friend, a comfort,
a thrill, an escape, or an entire universe, reading allows you to defy

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gravity and carry these moments and experiences with you. Books
change you because you carry their contents for the rest of your life.
The funny thing about books is that you’d never suspect them of magic
like this. They all look pretty much the same, don’t they? A spine. Two
covers. Some pages in between with dark scribbles on them. Maybe a
picture or two if you’re lucky. In our world, we have rules about what’s
possible and impossible, but books are how we break those rules. Books
let us sneak a little magic into our lives.
Never forget that you can do impossible things—as often as you like.
You can read minds, you can go anywhere imaginable without any
restrictions, and you can carry universes without breaking a sweat. And
if someone asks where you heard such an impossible thing, you can tell
them the truth: You read it in a book.
So when you look up at the moon on a quiet night before bed, think
about where you’d like to go next, and what you’d like to carry with you
on your journey through life. Seek out everything you love. Big things.
Small things. Real things. Magical things. It’s impossible, but you can
carry them all.
Read.
Explore.
Then read some more.

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41. Reading is like dancing with words

by Christine Kendall

The Literacy Day people were right in their guess that music and snacks
would draw more folks to the book festival. I sat behind the two neat piles
of books at my table, inhaled the buttery smell of popcorn, and watched
a woman let herself go over at the DJ’s booth—all shoulders and swing-
ing hips. She pranced from one author’s table to the next, picking
up books and tucking them under her right arm so she was already loaded up
pretty good when she got to me. I wondered for a moment if she could
manage to browse through my book with her one free hand, but I’d
already seen how this woman moved. She had good balance.
“I’d like to write,” the woman said, flipping through my book, “but I
don’t have enough words.”
Now, that already sounded like a poem to me.
“You have all the words you need,” I said. “I know ’cause I saw you
dancing over there.”
That woman’s eyes lit up like somebody had just given her free tickets
to a dance-off.
“You think so?” she said.
“No doubt about it.” I dropped my hands to my sides and stood stock
still. “Something came over me.” I recited those simple words that make
up the opening sentence of a short story by Toni Cade Bambara. “You
have those words,” I said to the woman. “We all do.”
I ran my hand over the smooth cover of my book and thought about
what makes reading magical. It’s the words, for sure, but it’s not how
many words a writer has. It’s how we use words to get under the skin of
our characters and bring their stories to life. It’s empathy, the ability to
share the feelings of others or, put another way, to feel their music. That’s
what’s magical about reading and it’s why I write. It’s like dancing with
words.

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I looked over at the barbershop across the corner from where we were
standing and saw a handsome teen bop down the steps, plop his baseball
cap backwards on his newly shorn head, and turn our way. He slid across
the street like he was walking on butter, but every move he made was in
time to the DJ’s beat. I don’t think he knew the dancing woman, but they
both lip-synced the song with flair, adding their own creative interpreta-
tion to the music.
The woman took her stack of books and moved on from my table. I
imagined her putting her words down on paper to capture the rhythm of
this neighborhood. A story just waiting to be told.

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42. Reading is something that can be
shared out loud

by Kody Keplinger

When I was nine years old, I brought home my first Harry Potter book. It
seemed so thick to me, with way too many pages in way too small font.
With my visual impairment, I’d have to read it with a magnifier, which
seemed like such an impossibly daunting task. Luckily, I’d brought it
home from the library that day because my mom had told me to, insisting
that she wanted to see what all the hype was about (the first movie would
be out soon) and that we could read it together.
Reading that book—and the next couple in the series—with my mom
is one of my fondest childhood memories. Not just because of the books,
though they became instant favorites, but because of the experience. I
loved sitting on the couch, listening to her read, pausing to comment or
gasp or share our intense emotions about a big moment in the story. But
it didn’t end with Harry Potter. We kept reading books together all the
way through middle school and high school, and even to this day, some-
times when my mom visits, we pick a book for her to read aloud to me.
Being read aloud to is no longer a necessity in my life. Audiobooks
and other accessible options have made reading solo much more feasible.
Instead, we do it because it’s fun. Because it’s a way to bond—to share
an experience that otherwise would be a solitary, isolated one.
My mom isn’t the only person I’ve bonded with through read-aloud
sessions, either. When I was in college, my roommate and I both shared
a passion for young adult novels. When she learned I hadn’t read a favor-
ite book of hers, I tentatively made a suggestion: “Maybe we could read
it together?” To my surprise and delight, she jumped at this. And from
then on, every single night, right before bed, we’d kick out any other
friends we had in our dorm room and read the next chapter or two of a
novel.

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This ended up being crucial for our budding friendship. It was a time
of day when, no matter what else was going on in our lives, no matter
what arguments we’d had or what homework was stressing us out, we put
it aside and just engaged in a story together. She’d read, I’d listen, and
we’d have something to discuss the next day. That was nearly a decade
ago, and to this day, when my freshman-year roommate and I see each
other, we still talk about some of the books we read together.
I love reading for the ways it can bring people together. Not just
through fandom—though that’s something I’ve always appreciated,
too—but through the actual shared experience. There’s something very
intimate about being read to or reading to someone else. It’s something I
think we leave behind us in our childhood far too often. And I’m glad
I’ve been lucky enough to have people in my life, even now in my late
twenties, willing to sit down and read aloud with me.
Books can create bonds between us. Bonds that last a lifetime. And
while I love reading a book by myself from time to time, I think the
closeness I developed with my mom and my friends through shared read-
ing experiences might be the biggest reason I love reading, and I am
forever grateful for them.

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43. Reading makes you the best kind of snoop

by Barbara Kerley

I’ve always been a people watcher. To be honest, I’m a bit of a snoop. I’m
very interested in what other people are up to.
My husband and daughter think I ask way too many questions, but I
can’t help it. I find people fascinating. I want to know what they think is
important, and why.
As a kid, I loved listening to stories about people who did extraordi-
nary things—artists, scientists, explorers, and trailblazers of all kinds. I
wanted to know everything I could about their lives. How did they
achieve their goals? What did it feel like? Why did it matter to them
so much?
So it’s not surprising that one day I would write biographies.
When I start writing a new book, I spend months researching. I try to
find primary sources like letters, diaries, and eyewitness accounts. It’s a
great way to get to know the person I’m writing about. In primary
sources, I can find intimate details that bring them to life.
Take John Adams, for example. I knew a lot about him when I started
writing my book Those Rebels, John & Tom. I knew he joined the
Continental Congress in Philadelphia. And I knew he worked hard to con-
vince the other delegates to vote for independence.
But I didn’t know much about him as a person. So I read his diary. It
turns out, he was very excited about the food he ate in Philadelphia. He
especially loved desserts.
“A most sinful feast again! Everything which could delight the eye or
allure the taste. Curds and creams, jellies, sweetmeats of various sorts,
20 sorts of tarts, fools, trifles, floating islands and whipped syllabubs.”
Primary sources showed me that the champion of democracy had
a real sweet tooth. (And in case you are curious, a whipped syllabub is a
frothy mixture of sweetened whipped cream, lemon juice, and wine.)

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Another wonderful source of information is letters. I knew that the
philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson loved living in Concord,
Massachusetts. I knew he valued the idea of community. But it was read-
ing this letter that showed me what a warm and welcoming friend he
must have been.

Dear Mr. Thayer, July 3, 1872


Come be a brave good cousin and face our heats
and solitudes on Friday eve . . . and we will give you a
cup of tea and piece of a moon and all the
possibilities of Saturday . . .

Sometimes, I write about people who were themselves writers. First


Lady Eleanor Roosevelt began a newspaper column in 1935 and kept on
writing it for almost thirty years. And when I read in one of her columns
that she liked hot dogs, it brought her instantly to life.
It’s through reading primary sources that I can spend time with people
I admire. I can discover through their own words who they were and how
they felt. It gives me insight into their values and character. And it allows
me—in the best of all possible ways—to be a snoop.

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44. Reading provides a lifeline when
everything is different

by Sabina Khan

When I looked around the schoolyard, I saw my new classmates clustered


in small groups, laughing and talking, comfortable with one another and
their surroundings despite the sweltering November afternoon. Having
recently moved from Germany to Bangladesh, I was displaced, plucked
from everything familiar to me—the sounds, the people, the food, and
even the air. Especially the air. Every breath I took alienated me. I was
alone in one of the most densely populated countries in the world. My
country. My people. But it didn’t feel like that yet. And it wouldn’t for a
long time.
Every day after lunch we had library period and I would walk around
the dimly lit room, wandering along the few shelves that lined the walls.
I didn’t understand any of the words because I hadn’t learned how to
speak in English yet. Or Bengali. I always had the strange sensation of
being underwater and not being able to make sense of what people above
the surface were saying. I could tell by the expressions on their faces
if they were losing patience with me or found me so foreign that they
couldn’t relate to me at all, despite the fact that on the outside I was just
like them, a brown-skinned eight-year-old girl. I wanted nothing more
than to go back to my real life in Germany, but I knew that wasn’t
possible.
One day the librarian noticed me standing in front of a row of books.
He came to me and asked me what kind of books I liked to read. When I
couldn’t answer him, he walked me over to a different bookshelf and
pulled out a book. It had stories about pioneer children in the Wild West.
I took it home and read it cover to cover with my mother watching over
me and an English-German dictionary by my side. After I finished it, I
went back for more and didn’t stop until I had read the entire shelf. I read

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stories about hardship and new surroundings, about bravery and spirit,
and even though these stories were about children I had nothing whatso-
ever in common with, they still resonated with me.
Books became my lifeline to this new world I found myself in, where
everyone already knew everyone else and I was the only newcomer. In
stories I could lose myself and forget the hurt and resentment that
reminded me every minute of the day that I was an outsider. I devoured
Enid Blyton’s boarding school series because it was a connection to my
old life, where I used to read these same stories in German. I read her
mystery series because the characters were so familiar even in a different
language.
One day during lunch, instead of going outside, I decided to stay in the
classroom and read. I didn’t notice when my classmates came back in,
and when I looked up, I saw one of them smiling at me. She was holding
up a book in the series I was reading. That was the first of many things
we shared over the years, and that was the first time I knew I would be all
right.
Books have always been a lifeline for me since then. Even as a young
immigrant, at twenty-six years old, I found myself turning to books for
solace and to find my place in this new life I had embarked on. This time
I devoured stories of immigrants who, like me, had traveled halfway
across the world to build a new life. These stories connected me to some-
thing much bigger than myself and allowed me to see myself as part of a
larger picture. But most of all, at each stage in my life when I’ve felt
invisible, books have made me feel seen and have given me a voice. It’s
the voice I’ve used to rebuild my life countless times, to teach my chil-
dren to stand on their own feet, proud of and strong in their identities.
And it’s the voice I use when I write my stories, hoping that they will
inspire others and give them strength, the way stories have always done
for me.

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45. a Life in panels (tentative title)

by Kazu Kibuishi

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46. Reading helps people feel

by Amy Sarig King

I love reading because it helps me find my feelings. It helps me escape


them, too. It’s the same reason I love writing. And looking at the night
sky, and taking walks in nature, and canoeing. For me, it’s pretty much
all the same—whatever I’m doing connects to how I’m feeling.
When I was a little kid, I was aware of my emotions. Not in control of
them, mind you, but aware of them. I was also very aware that certain
emotions were not allowed at certain times, by certain people. This posed
a problem for me because I believed then, at age four, as I believe now, at
age fifty, that emotions are very important personal things and that no
one else can tell a person how to feel or when to feel.
But in between, reader—in between ages four and forty-nine—I
started to pretend that I didn’t have feelings. I did it to stay safe from
people who got angry at my emotions. I did it to hide my real feelings
from people who would be cruel if they knew I was not feeling the way
they wanted me to feel. I did it because I had to be tough, and as a woman,
tough meant not showing my feelings. Especially any feelings that any-
one could label “negative.”
Oh, reader.
What a world we live in when we are taught to believe that we should
be happy all the time. What a lie we are being asked to live.
And live that lie, I did. For many years. On the outside, I looked as
happy as everyone wanted me to look. On the inside, I still had all kinds
of feelings, and I wrote them down in my journals and in poems, and I
read books that made me feel seen. I read Where the Wild Things Are
because it made me feel like it was okay to be mad. I read all of Paul
Zindel’s novels as a teenager because he made me feel like I was going to
be okay as long as I was honest and true to myself.

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Now that I publish books, I get to write novels that encourage readers
to feel things. I get letters that say, “I cried for hours after this book,” and
while me liking that sounds like I want people to cry, well, that would be
accurate. I do want people to cry, because sometimes life hands you
things that make you cry. And I want young people to feel angry because
life hands us all kinds of things to be angry about, and I want young
people to feel like they are allowed to feel and allowed to think about
those feelings and allowed to talk about those feelings. Our world so
often tells us to shut up about our feelings and I think it’s hurting us as
people. I know it’s hurting us as people.
I love reading because it helps people feel. There are scientific studies
that prove that reading improves empathy, quality of life, and especially
your connection with your own emotions. I have finally learned that feel-
ings are great things to have. I want you to think that, too. Hiding yourself
from the world is no way to live. And once we realize that every emotion
we have is important, the more real happiness we will have in our lives.
It’s a win-win! Trust me. Feel stuff. Read books. Write poems. Be proud.
Be you. Feelings and all.

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47. Reading lets you know you’re not the only one

by Bill Konigsberg

When I was young, I thought I was the only gay kid in the world.
This was the 1980s. Before the Internet. It was also before there were
a significant number of characters who were LGBTQIA+ on television or
in books.
I loved books, and I devoured them. I read all my sister’s Judy Blume
books, and I adored them, but still I didn’t really see myself in them. I
didn’t see any kids who were keeping my secret from their family, the
one that made me feel different and alone.
And that made me feel very alone.
That all changed one day when I found a bookstore in New York City,
where I lived, called the Oscar Wilde Bookshop. It was a bookstore
devoted to LGBTQIA+ readers. I’d never known such a place existed, but
here it was, a store with walls of books with people who were like me in
this one important way.
I was seventeen when I found that store, and I bought a lot of books. I
read one called Tales of the City, which was about a group of people in
San Francisco who all felt like misfits, like me. They were also all kind.
Some were gay, some were straight, some were bi, some were trans. It
was the first time I saw people who shared my heart, who had struggled
with feeling alone and sometimes felt sad, but also sometimes didn’t, and
who wanted to make the world a better place but sometimes messed up.
That book changed me forever. I’ve felt alone since, like all people do
sometimes, but I’ve never felt quite as alone as I did before.
And now I get to be on the other side. I write books about LGBTQIA+
youth, and I get to meet some of those young people, and it makes me
feel so happy when I see that same look in their eyes. That they are
finally able to read books where they see parts of themselves for maybe
the first time.

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And it’s books, more than anything else. More than TV or movies.
Because reading a book is a far more personal experience than watching
a show or movie. It’s more interactive. It puts us in the middle of a situa-
tion, or acquaints us with a character in a more personal way. That’s why
I love books so much: for their ability to touch my heart.
To be able to write these sorts of books, like the ones that helped me?
It is literally the best feeling I’ve ever had. To know I’m giving back the
gift I got.

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48. Reading gets you through the storm

by Gordon Korman

I’m crouched under a heavy library table with four Texas teachers and we
could all be dead in the blink of an eye.
According to the schedule, I should be in the cafeteria, presenting to
an audience of three hundred kids. But the National Weather Service
spotted a line of tornadoes, due west and heading our way. The three
hundred kids are sitting up against the library walls right now—and
walls throughout the school—in the duck-and-cover position.
You might remember these tornadoes. If you’ve ever seen the YouTube
clips of eighteen-ton semis being tossed violently around a parking lot by
a powerful twister, that’s what’s bearing down on us. Of course, we don’t
know that at the time. All we have is weather radar of the storm system
on one of the teacher’s phones. And we’re directly in its path.
To be honest, the teachers seem pretty calm about this, and so do the
students. This is Dallas, where tornado alerts in April are kind of busi-
ness as usual. The only person freaking out is the Canadian-born, New
York–based visiting author. I’ve never lived anywhere twisters are a
problem. The sum of my tornado knowledge is that they’re capable of a)
carrying Dorothy and Toto over the rainbow, and b) a lot of other things,
all of them scary. I don’t want to look like a baby in front of the kids, but
I’m literally shaking.
So I peer out from under the table at the books on the nearby stacks. A
faded spine catches my eye—Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy
Blume. Rising above my terror, I reach out and pluck the weathered
paperback from the shelf. I can’t help myself. When I was a kid, Tales of
a Fourth Grade Nothing was my book. I was in fourth grade when it was
new. It was the first time I really saw myself in a novel. In a way, it’s
responsible for my entire career. My first book was a school project. I
could have written anything. But thanks to Judy Blume and Beverly

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Cleary, The Great Brain and The Mad Scientists’ Club, it was natural for
my storytelling to take the form of a classic old-fashioned middle grade
novel. I’m the writer I am because of the reader I used to be.
I’m transported into the world of Peter Hatcher and his brother, Fudge,
and instantly I’m nine years old again, and no longer crouched under a
table waiting for a twister to blow the school away. The next thing I know,
a bell is ringing. Wonder of wonders, it isn’t the kiss-your-butt-goodbye
alarm. It’s the all clear!
The kids are already filing out of the library. The teachers have all
crawled out from under my table. I’m the only one still huddled there, lost
in my reading.
“Where’s everybody going?” I ask.
“To the cafeteria,” the librarian replies. “For the author assembly.”
Oh, right. That would be me.
Props to those Texas kids. They’re a fantastic audience ten minutes
after a life-and-death near miss. As for their visiting author, he makes it
through too—with a little help from Peter and Fudge.
I can’t say that’s my number one reason to love reading, or even
number one hundred. But it’s very high on the list when I look back on
that day.

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49. Reading gets you excited to create
49. Readingbygets
Jarrettyou excited to create
J. Krosoczka
by Jarrett Krosoczka

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50. Reading introduces you to inspiring people

by Kirby Larson

Her name was Mitsue Shiraishi. And we met in the best way possible:
through the written word.
Later I would come to know the book of Mitsi: a good student who
played high school basketball. After graduation, she cared for her elderly
parents. Tended the family strawberry farm. Doted on a terrier mix
named Chubby.
At our first encounter, she was a mere paragraph in a book titled
Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American
Community. I didn’t even know if Mitsi was a child or an adult. But those
first few words were sufficient to give me a sense of her heart. Her deter-
mination. Her courage.
In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which
spoke to creating areas from which “any and all persons may be excluded.”
But the intent of the order wasn’t to exclude any and all. And there was
no “may” about it. The intent was to “exclude” every single person who
looked like the enemy. In the end, FDR’s autograph forced about 120,000
people of Japanese descent (most of them American citizens) from their
homes and into incarceration camps. Mitsi was among them.
With no idea where she’d end up, she packed what she could into the
two suitcases allowed. Would she need warm-weather clothes? Sweaters
and galoshes? Somehow such decisions were made. Maybe, like others,
Mitsi sold her sewing machine. A piano. The family car. All for pennies
on the dollar to those who fed on the misery of the soon-to-be incarcer-
ated. It was March when it was Mitsi’s time to go. Strawberries were left
to bloom, ripen, and rot in her family’s carefully tended fields.
Thousands of people were forcibly removed from their homes.
Thousands ended up in desolate places with ironic names: Camp

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Harmony. Heart Mountain. Thousands lined up for dreary meals of
Vienna sausage and boiled potatoes. Waited their turns to use glorified
outhouses.
If thousands shared Mitsi’s story, why did reading those few lines
about her affect me so deeply?
Blame it on one word: Chubby.
It turns out, Mitsi was as besotted with Chubby as I was with my dog,
Winston. My love for Winston led me to share a bed with four paws and
a wiggly tail, cook special foods, buy dog toys by the dozen.
Mitsi’s love for Chubby led her to take on the US Army.
In those sentences where we first met, I learned that Mitsi tried to fol-
low all the rules for evacuation. But rule number three stated: “No pets of
any kind shall be permitted.” Mitsi was leaving her neighbors, her home,
her farm; surely her country wouldn’t separate her from Chubby. She
wrote the general in charge, begging to be allowed to take her beloved
four-legged friend.
That request was denied.
Neither Mitsi’s letter nor the general’s has survived. But those were
words I did not need to examine. Mitsi’s action spurred me to actions of
my own, including reading everything I could about the incarceration;
wonderful research librarians helped me uncover the meticulously kept
diary of the superintendent of education at Minidoka, one of the ten
incarceration camps. My reading led me to Judy Kusakabe, Mitsi’s step-
daughter, who welcomed this complete stranger into her family’s story,
sharing rare and precious ephemera—camp yearbooks, diaries, photos.
Meeting Mitsi on the page inspired me to write a novel, Dash, featur-
ing a young girl separated from her beloved dog. Even more rewarding,
those few lines have inspired kid—and adult—readers all over this coun-
try to delve deeper into a shameful slice of American history. It all
happened because of something I read. All because of one person.
Her name was Mitsue Shiraishi.

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51. Reading makes you who you are

by Kathryn Lasky

There is a country in my head that would not be there if I didn’t read. I


read because I am. I am because I read. The Kathryn Lasky that exists
now is because of reading. But I was co-parented by two wonderful
people—Hortense and Marven Lasky—and by books, thousands upon
thousands of books. The words I have read run like a stream through my
mind. Where would I be without Scout Finch, Mary Lennox, Holden
Caulfield, Scarlett O’Hara, Dorothy and (oh dear) the Tin Woodman? For
as the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz said to the Scarecrow, who
desperately wanted brains: He would rather take a heart, “for brains do
not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.”
I am happy—but, yes, sometimes sad—because I read. But without
stories I would be incomplete. My world would be colorless. My capacity
for empathy stillborn. Books helped make me. And now I make books. I
have come full circle in this universe of words.

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52. Reading makes us all detectives

by Peter Lerangis

I was lying on my bed, shivering uncontrollably. On a humid, ninety-


degree summer night in a room with no air-conditioning, this was not
normal. I didn’t scream for my parents because my teeth chattered. With
shaky hands, I put down the book I was reading. And I did what any
perfectly healthy eleven-year-old would do.
I freaked.
Swinging my legs around, I took deep breaths. Maybe I had the flu. Or
some rare toxic crud carried to Long Island on the winds of the Gulf
Stream. Or growing pains. Whatever those were.
My uncle and aunt were visiting, so I felt weird about walking down-
stairs in my shivery state and pleading for h-h-h-help.
Besides, I was dying to get back to my short story. It was called “To
Build a Fire,” by one of my favorite adventure writers, Jack London.
Earlier that year I’d read his awesome novel Call of the Wild, and that
evening I’d cracked open a collection of his stories.
Skin tingling, I bravely flung myself back onto the bed. The book was
splayed open, facedown. The cover showed a dog or wolf racing across a
bleak, snowy landscape. Here’s what I remember about the story: a man
and his husky are stranded in a blizzard. They run out of food far from
civilization, with no way of navigating. As the dog begins to falter, the
man struggles to feed it and keep it alive—even though he knows this
might risk his own life. Sure enough, he soon grows weak. He’s just
about dead when the dog begins to protect him. It’s a story about sur-
vival, about the love and devotion between animals and humans. But all
you’re thinking as you read it is one of them is going to die.
I picked it up and resumed reading. My shivering started again, but I
ignored it. After I finished, all I could do was lie there, stunned. Letting

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the story bang around inside my brain. Thinking, thinking, thinking.
And that’s when I realized what was wrong with my body.
It was the book.
It was Jack London’s fault.
It was words. Just words.
Somehow these little squiggles of ink had reached inside me like a
virus. Only this didn’t cause sickness. This felt more awesome than any-
thing I’d ever experienced.
I had to share it with someone.
My dad would get it. I knew that. He was in the den, so I ran down-
stairs, grabbed the knob, and flung open the door. “Dad! Dad,
I just—”
I saw him on the sofa next to my uncle, both of them intently watching
a baseball game on TV. It must have been a great game, because they
were screaming at the screen.
My dad turned to me and said hi, what’s up. Or maybe he didn’t. All I
remember is that the feeling was starting to fade. The freezing cold. The
excitement. The strangeness of what had just happened to me. It was
leaking out, like the air from a balloon.
I knew it wasn’t the right moment.
If I said anything, that feeling would lose power. Maybe forever. It felt
that fragile. And I was not ready to let it go. So without saying another
word, I quietly pulled the door shut and said nothing.
Thumping back upstairs into my room, I began reading the story
again. But now I wasn’t reading for the action or the plot. I was reading
like a detective. I wanted to find Jack London’s secrets.
How did he do it? I mean, every writer used the same ingredients—
nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. But as I read, I saw that the trick was in
other things. Rhythms. Withheld information. Rich word choices.
Creative absences of information. I wasn’t sure about any of this, but it
was thrilling to see even a bit behind that kind of power.
As I put the book down, I imagined being able to do something like
that myself—to make other people feel, actually feel in the gut, using

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nothing but words. Up till then I’d never imagined anything I could do for
a living. But this? If I could even come close to doing this, there could be
no better way to spend a life.
I still feel that way. I feel lucky to wake up each morning to give it
another try—and grateful for that long-ago evening, when chills caused
me to become a writer.
I owe it all to Jack.

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53. Reading is for curious cats

by Sarah Darer Littman

Do you ask a lot of questions? Do the grown-ups in your life ever get tired
of you asking, “Why?”
If so, we’ve got a lot in common, because that was me as a kid. In fact,
it’s still me as an adult.
You’ve probably heard the old proverb curiosity killed the cat as warn-
ing against asking too many questions. But if that were true, I would be
six feet under. Pushing up daisies. Deceased.
Writers tend to be very curious people.
It turns out that proverb couldn’t be more wrong. Curiosity is what
drives us to learn and discover. According to a study by the Pew Research
Center, some of the key skills needed to succeed in today’s jobs—
and especially the future jobs that will be available when you grow up and
enter the workforce—are “emotional intelligence, curiosity, creativity,
adaptability, resilience, and critical thinking.”*
What’s really interesting is that these are skills even the most sophis-
ticated artificial intelligence can’t replicate. They’re the skills that make
us most human.
Can you imagine one of the best ways to learn these skills? You
guessed it—reading books!

But don’t just take that from me. In a 2015 interview, former US president
Barack Obama said: “The most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve
learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being
comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of
grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive

* Rainie, Lee. “Skills Required for Future Jobs: 10 Facts.” Pew Research Center: Internet,
Science & Tech, Pew Research Center, 19 June 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org
/internet/2018/06/19/skill-requirements-for-future-jobs-10-facts/.

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for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with
some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.” *
I’m with President Obama. By reading books, I’ve been able to travel
the world while still snuggled under the covers. I’ve imagined myself as
a wizard, a queen, and a knight; as a scientist and an explorer; as a detec-
tive and a journalist, as a spy and a soldier. Perhaps most importantly,
reading helps me to understand and connect with people who might lead
lives that are very different from mine. It’s helped me recognize that even
if we come from different cultures, speak a different language, or prac-
tice a different religion, we share common emotions, hopes, and dreams.
As a writer, I’ve always been the most curious about exploring what
happens in those complicated gray areas President Obama mentioned.
Why do people make the decisions they do when the answers aren’t clear-
cut? Would I make the same decision or a different one if I found myself
in the same circumstances? Books give us curious cats a chance not just
to explore other lives, but also to think about and discuss ethics, a subject
that doesn’t seem to get nearly enough attention.

So ignore the naysayers and give your curiosity license to explore. Read
more books—you’ll be amazed at all the things you can discover!

* Robinson, Marilynne, and Barack Obama. “President Obama & Marilynne Robinson:
A Conversation-II.” The New York Review of Books, 19 Nov. 2015, https://www.nybooks
.com/articles/2015/11/19/president-obama-marilynne-robinson-conversation-2/.

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54. Reading gives us courage

by Natalie Lloyd

Reading opened my heart to worlds that had no limits.


This was a big deal for me. Because my real world felt crowded with
them. (Limits, I mean.)
There are the usual, standard limits I don’t think much about, like
gravity and traffic rules. But there are others, too, physical ones, that I
still work through daily. I was born with a brittle bone disease called
osteogenesis imperfecta. This meant spending elementary and middle
school in a wheelchair, or using a walker, because my bones weren’t
strong enough to handle a fall. Or an accidental bumping-into. I had lots
of clunky casts, surgeries, physical therapy, and endless reminders to be
careful. I often overheard people say that I was fragile.
When I read a book, however, I never felt fragile.
Or broken.
Or like I had to be careful.
I didn’t feel limited at all.
Reading has been a snicker of magic for me, always.
The first time I felt book magic was when I read the Narnia series in
elementary school. It was as if the air in the room changed when I opened
the cover and read the first line, like some cheesy scene in a movie. My
skin prickled on account of the (fictional) Narnia snow. The (fictional)
lamppost in the forest was so vivid in my imagination that it felt like a
real memory, not just a scene in a book. Lucy’s wild courage got tangled
up inside me somehow. And Aslan’s roar became a permanent part of my
heart. (When I ended up in the hospital for a broken leg, I would some-
times close my eyes through painful procedures and imagine I was
holding on to Aslan.)
Those stories were fictional. I get that. But the courage that I found in
the pages—in zillions of pages from other stories I loved—was real.

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Books became a constant, gentle reminder that I wasn’t alone in my
feelings or fears. My favorite fictional friends like Anne Shirley, Kristy
Thomas, Fern Arable, pretty much every character Judy Blume ever
wrote, and (later on) Luna Lovegood all had scary, difficult, or impossible-
feeling circumstances in their world. They battled bullies and dark
wizards and phantom phone callers. I think we all have battles happen-
ing, too.
Not with dark wizards or phantom phone callers, hopefully.
But I think maybe we’re all a little bit fragile in places, whether it’s
brittle bones or broken hearts or tough memories that still make us cry.
Like our favorite characters, we’re stronger than we know. We all have
stories to tell. And we’re all wildly unlimited in our hearts, imaginations,
and ability to add a little kindness and hope to the world.
We’re all kings or queens in Narnia, whenever we want to be. Or
need to be.
Sometimes courage is just a page turn away.

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55. Reading makes you feel seen
(without having to explain yourself)

by Tracy Mack

The woods behind our house were my sanctuary. Every weekend, book
in hand, I’d slip away from the breakfast table, sidle past the rust-battered
swing set, and brave the prickly vines and creeping poison ivy to my
spot. Harriet came with me. And Margaret and Deenie and Ramona and
Fudge and Sally. Here in my own tiny forest, I was liberated from my
oldest brother’s inescapable rock music, his angry drums that shook the
house, and the stream of unsavory, mop-haired boys who rehearsed in
our basement.
I’d stretch out on a flat rock and settle in for a trip to Manhattan or
suburban New Jersey or Portland, Oregon. Sometimes I’d climb the big-
gest oak and curl into the hammock of its wide, low branch. Something
about nature’s furniture and the loamy smell of damp earth and sun-
kissed leaves set my imagination free and allowed me to sink deeply into
another world. Even now, I love reading outside best of all. It’s there that
I feel most connected to something larger than myself.
Because I’d read the same books—Harriet the Spy; Are You There,
God? It’s Me, Margaret.; Deenie; all the Ramona books and the Fudge
books; and my favorite, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself—so many
times, we connected and reconnected like old friends. As they invited me
into their inner worlds, I felt safe to commune things I only dimly under-
stood about my eldest brother’s volatile behavior. My book friends kept
my secrets and provided pleasant distractions. I felt seen without having
to explain myself.
On the best weekend mornings, my day would start long before break-
fast, when my middle brother and I dragged from his closet a massive
clear garbage bag filled with Archie comics. I relished the dramas
between Betty and Veronica—and especially this time with my brother,

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reading side by side on our bellies, quiet together in a contented, storied
silence.
Before bed, my mother read to me, often the same books I’d already
read on my own. She was a bookworm and had once aspired to be an
actress, so she was skilled with expression. All these years later, I can
still hear her interpretation of Judy Blume’s Fudge. Curled up in bed just
the two of us, with my mother’s melodic, Boston-laced voice washing
over me and Fudge’s misadventures amusing me, I was at ease and trans-
ported. And so was she, temporarily relieved of her preoccupation with
my brother, and sharing her favorite entertainment with me.
Even though my early years were filled with books, I didn’t consider
myself a reader. I wasn’t in the highest reading group at school; I didn’t
have wide-ranging taste; and I had no interest in newspapers or adult
novels like my best friend did. I deemed myself mediocre. It wasn’t until
high school and college that I began to explore more deeply. And it wasn’t
until much later that I understood that the very act of reading—be it
comic books or the same books time and again—made me a reader.
I’m glad I didn’t count myself out. If I had, I would have missed so
much connection and comfort, joy and discovery. And I might not have
become a writer. Reading opened the world to me and showed me that as
humans, we may be flawed, fearful, and fragile, but we are whole, and
we are all longing for the same things: visibility, empathy, community,
and above all, love.

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56. Reading makes you less alone

by Carolyn Mackler

I was a “weird” kid. I was “cute” enough and “friendly” enough that most
people assumed I was “normal.” But I wore a thatched flowerpot on my
head (around the neighborhood, third grade). I wrote illustrated picture
books about meeting Hitler (fourth grade). I wore plaid dresses because I
liked to pretend I went to a fictional boarding school (fifth grade; the
other girls wore designer jeans). The last bit about the boarding school
dresses probably contributed to why things tanked socially in middle
school. Boys snickered at me and girls edged away from being my friend
and teachers did nothing to help. I began to feel lost and alone. And while
I always loved reading, middle school is when novels saved my life.
In books I found characters who were quirky like me or felt alone like
I did. I found characters who didn’t fit in—or sometimes I found charac-
ters who were having a blast because it wasn’t all bad. Often I was having
plenty of fun and I wanted to read about adventurous kids who were
enjoying their childhoods as much as I was. I had a best friend, a loyal
dog, and loving parents. That helps when your school life stinks.
I love reading because it has always made me feel more connected,
less alone. And that is exactly why I write. In my most recent novel, Not
If I Can Help It, I wrote about eleven-year-old Willa. She has sensory
processing disorder. That means her brain processes stimuli differently
than most people. Socks with itchy seams make Willa want to scream and
mushy foods make her want to gag and sometimes she shrieks and hops
around and wants to be squished. My son, who is now a teenager, strug-
gled with sensory processing disorder when he was younger. I did too
when I was a kid. As my son was dealing with his disability, there were
times when he felt judged by other kids—and I felt judged by other par-
ents. That’s why I wrote Willa’s story. I wanted to write a book that
someone like my son, or a kid like me, would have loved to read. The best

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thing is that since Not If I Can Help It has come out, I’ve gotten letters
from readers telling me that they have sensory processing disorder or
they hate itchy seams. They thank me for writing Willa’s story and help-
ing them feel less alone!
Hey, did you notice that I put “weird” and “cute” and “friendly” and
“normal” in quotes? Now that I’m a grown-up, I’ve realized something
huge. MAJOR. Those words mean zilch. When I was a kid I thought that
weird = bad. I thought that cute = the blond girl who smiled a lot. I
thought that normal = the family who was definitely not mine. I thought
that friendly = the chatty person who always knew the right thing to say.
But it’s NOT true, okay? So obliterate those words from your vocabulary
and be yourself. In fact, read this again and substitute those four words in
quotes for “awesome” or “happy.” Ahhhh, much better!

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57. Reading can satisfy our curiosity . . . or fire it up

by Ann M. Martin

Reading (and books, stories, and storytelling) has been part of my life for
as long as I can remember. My parents read to my sister and me before we
knew how to talk. In the evenings, when Jane and I were older, we would
curl up on the couch with our parents while one or the other read to us
from The Wizard of Oz or Charlotte’s Web or the books by Beatrix Potter.
My father made up stories about a tiny man named Mr. Piebald who lived
in the apartment-building oak tree in the woods behind our house. He
told us Mr. Piebald stories for years.
When I was young I read every day, but I didn’t stop to wonder why I
loved reading. I just enjoyed it. Long after I was too old for picture books,
I would wander into our den, scan the bookshelves, and pull out Wait Till
the Moon Is Full by Margaret Wise Brown, or The Little House by
Virginia Lee Burton, or Millions of Cats by Wanda Gág, all favorites. I
would read them over and over, examining the pictures, then go back to
my room and read The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings or Rascal
by Sterling North—books for much older readers.
As an adult I still read every single day. I read while I eat meals, I read
when I get in bed at night, I read on planes and trains and the subway, and
I try to carve out a little chunk of time every morning, even just fifteen
minutes, to settle myself. I like to go into a calm place in my head, clear
out my thoughts, and focus on someone else’s story.
So here’s a secret: I’m also a bit nosy, which is another reason I like
other people’s stories. And when you get right down to it, it’s one of the
reasons I love reading. I want to know things, all sorts of things. What’s
in that box? Where did you grow up? How on earth are you going to get
yourself out of the mess you’ve gotten into? As you can imagine, I par-
ticularly like mysteries. Who bonked the butler over the head? (The
butler isn’t always the culprit.) Why did someone bonk him? I like

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historical novels too. What did people eat three hundred years ago? What
were their houses like? Biographies and memoirs are of particular inter-
est because I get to find out details of the lives of real people. What could
be better?
Of course, I also like words. Sometimes I’m in awe of the words a
writer uses to describe something, whether that something is as ordinary
as a shoe or as elusive as a feeling. I reread sentences that I particularly
like, letting the words roll around in my head. I think about words. (Why
is “Piebald” funny?) I like homophones; I even have favorite ones,
“phrase” and “frays,” “sword” and “soared.”
Books and words tease our imaginations. They can satisfy our curios-
ity or they can fire it up. They make us think, they take us on journeys.
And all from a few squiggles on paper.

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58. Reading transports you

by Wendy Mass

I spent a lot of time staring at a poster that hung on the wall of my fourth-
grade classroom—a drawing of a large ship parting the ocean. The quote
on it was from poet Emily Dickinson: There is no frigate like a book to
take us lands away. The large dictionary in the front of the class con-
firmed that a frigate was a fast, powerful boat.
At that point I hadn’t had the experience of being transported any-
where by a book, and I really needed to be. My family was going through
a rough patch. Home had suddenly become a confusing place and school
was a welcome escape. One afternoon my teacher began reading to us
from a big anthology made up of excerpts from different novels. The
story she read that day was about four siblings who stepped into a ward-
robe (which she explained was like a freestanding closet), and found
themselves in a world called Narnia, full of magical talking creatures. I
was captivated. My own problems fell away as I sat on the carpet, lost in
this new world. I was too shy to ask the name of the book afterward (and
I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t paying attention!). But as soon as it was
our class’s turn for our weekly trip to the school library, I began pulling
books off the shelves, frantically searching for this story that had trans-
ported me in the way that the poster promised a book could do.
The librarian came to my rescue, gently asking me to describe what I
was looking for. I told her as much as I remembered. A minute later she
placed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis in my hands.
I hungrily read the first page and knew this was the right one.
That book didn’t leave my hands the whole week. I ate with it, I slept
with it, I read it three times, cover to cover. During wartime, the four
siblings found their escape in Narnia, where they were powerful and
loved. Through their experiences, I, too, felt powerful and loved, and that
feeling lasted even when I closed the book. When I reluctantly returned

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it the following week, the librarian reached below her desk and pulled out
another book. “Here,” she whispered, handing it to me like a secret. “I
thought you might like this.” I looked down at the cover, then hugged it
to my chest. THERE WAS A SEQUEL! The librarian smiled and told me
there were actually seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia series. I
think I may have cried.
I have no doubt that reading about these ordinary kids having extraor-
dinary adventures turned me into a reader, and years later, into a writer
who wanted to make the next generation of readers feel the way that
Narnia made me feel. A few years ago, I got a letter from a young reader
that said, “Your book 11 Birthdays is my favorite book. Even though I
have a copy at home, I like to visit the copy on my school library’s shelf,
whenever it’s checked in. Then today there was another book right next
to it that I hadn’t seen before. I pulled it out. It was called Finally, and the
cover said it was a sequel to 11 Birthdays. I screamed and hugged it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
Needless to say, getting this letter made me feel like my life had come
full circle in the best possible way. So keep pulling books off the shelves
until you find one that makes you not want to put it back. And then find
more and more like that. As writer George R. R. Martin wrote, “A reader
lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only
one.” I wish you many, many lives.

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59. Reading is like breathing

by Patricia C. McKissack

Long before I became a writer, I was a listener and an observer. My rela-


tives, who were dynamic and skilled storytellers, helped develop my
listening and observation skills before I could read or write.
On hot summer evenings our family would sit on the porch and listen
to my grandmother tell a hair-raising ghost story, or my mother would
recite Dunbar poems or Bible stories. Sometimes we’d get a real treat
when my grandfather would dramatize an episode from his childhood,
told in the rich and colorful dialect of the Deep South. I can still hear him
beginning a yarn, saying: “It was back in nineteen and twenty-seven. I
disremember the exact day, but it was long ’bout July, ’cause the skeeters
was bitin’ whole chunks outta my arms . . .”
When I was growing up, we kids called the half hour just before night-
fall the dark-thirty. We had exactly half an hour to get home before the
monsters came out.
During the hot, muggy summer, when days last longer, we gathered
on the front porch to pass away the evening hours. Grandmama’s hands
were always busy, but while shelling peas or picking greens, she told a
spine-chilling ghost tale about Laughing Lizzie, a specter who’d gone
mad after losing her entire family in a fire. Her hysterical laughter was
said to drive listeners insane.
Then on cold winter nights when the dark-thirty came early, our fam-
ily sat in the living room and talked. The talk generally led to one of
Grandmama’s hair-raising tales. As the glimmers of light faded from the
window overlooking the woods, she told about Gray Jim, the runaway
slave who’d been killed while trying to escape. Gray Jim’s ghost haunted
the woods on moonless nights. “Sorry for those who hear Gray Jim’s
dying screams,” she whispered, “ ’cause they’re not long for this world.”

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At this point my grandmother would pause and say, “Pat, go in the kitchen
and get me a glass of water.”
Many years later I learned that Laughing Lizzie and Gray Jim had been
real people in our small African American community. The strange—and
often sad—circumstances of their deaths had inspired the ghost stories
that lived after them. They inspired me, too.
As a youngster I had no idea that my heritage would one day be the
springboard for my writing career.
Somewhere around age seven I discovered reading. And so began my
lifelong love affair with the printed word, a passion I share with my hus-
band and writing partner, Fred. To us, reading is like breathing; both are
essential to life.

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60. Reading brings you sharks, snakes,
and . . . Ramona

by Kate Messner

Where I grew up, there were farms and apple orchards. Neighbors on our
road knew whether you went straight up the hill to the house from the bus
or not. It was a tiny village, with one store downtown where you could
buy a dress for a school dance and one where you could buy new gym
sneakers in September. There was no bookstore. But there was a friendly
little library. And an elementary school that sent home Scholastic Book
Club flyers each month.
I’d wait and wait for the day that flyer came home tucked in my folder.
I’d go to my room, pull the cap off a fat Magic Marker, and sniff it (we
had the ones that smelled of grape and orange) while I pored over the
books on those flimsy newsprint pages. When I circled the ones I wanted,
the marker bled through the page. Sometimes it was hard to tell if it was that
shark book on page three that I wanted or the mystery on page four.
That was okay because really I wanted them both. I wanted them all.
Books were an escape from the be-careful rules and don’t-go-far walls of
my small town. They reflected my life back at me even as they taught me
to imagine more.
The truth is, my favorite character of all was a girl a lot like me—
Beverly Cleary’s Ramona, who asked too many questions and made messes
and got into lots of curiosity-fueled trouble. Remember the scene where
Ramona made a crown of burrs (like the boy in the TV commercial . . .
“Ta-da!”) and got it hopelessly stuck in her hair? I read that over and over.
Inspired by Ramona, I confiscated my father’s cigarettes and replaced
them with rolled-up paper warnings about the dangers of smoking. Like
Ramona, I got in trouble. And like Ramona, I was forgiven. Her stories
taught me it was okay to be curious, okay to be a little different.

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My memories of Ramona are a big reason I’ve come to be such an
advocate for books that feature characters from traditionally under-
represented backgrounds. As a white girl growing up in a small town, I
got to see myself in stories all the time. Not everyone did, and knowing
what that meant to me, growing up, makes me want it for all kids now.
The other books I circled over and over again in my flyers were non-
fiction titles that were loaded with cool facts and photos. I’m not sure
why—maybe it was the feeling that nothing happened in my small
town?—but books about dangerous animals and natural disasters were
my favorites. If there were wild tornadoes, sharks with razor-sharp teeth,
or venomous snakes with glistening fangs on the cover, I circled that
book as fast as I could. (Then I’d check to see what got accidentally cir-
cled on the next page when the marker bled through. An Encyclopedia
Brown mystery? Perfect!)
I may have grown up in a small town, but my world never felt small,
thanks to the books I read. It’s no wonder that I became a writer, or that
research is one of my favorite parts of the process, whether I’m exploring
the historic beaches of Normandy or tracking giant tortoises in the
Galápagos Islands. Reading planted the curiosity that fuels my life as an
author today. The stories that landed on my desk each month taught me
that there was a big world out there—a wild and fascinating place worth
exploring and sharing every chance I’d get.

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61. Reading gives you comfort

by Ellen Miles

Like all avid readers, I love reading for so many reasons. I read for excite-
ment, adventure, and knowledge; for distraction, for connection, and, of
course, for pleasure. But I also read for what I think is one of the best
reasons to love reading: for comfort.
A friend of mine says she loves the books I write because all the sto-
ries have a guaranteed happy ending. “It says so, right on the front,” she
tells people. And so it does, there at the top of every one of the book cov-
ers: “The Puppy Place—Where every puppy finds a home.”
Kind of a spoiler, I guess—maybe it ruins the suspense for some read-
ers, but it makes me happy to know that kids can dive into any one of my
books without worrying too much about whether things will work out for
the adorable foster puppy pictured on the cover. That kind of reading can
be comforting, like a warm blanket you pull over yourself on a gray, driz-
zly day.
A happy ending isn’t essential for comfort. Sometimes familiarity is
comforting, like a book with characters and settings we know well.
Sometimes neutral topics like bird identification or recipes for banana
muffins will do the trick. Even murder mysteries can be comforting—
there’s a whole genre known as the “cozy,” often set in a quiet British
village.
Happy endings or not, I read for comfort when I am lonely or bored or
sad, when I am sick or hurting, when I’m feeling the need for a treat and
a banana muffin just won’t cut it. I read cookbooks and comics; animal
stories and tales of adventure; novels and nature guides; mysteries and
series books (and some mystery series books, even though I’m really not
a mystery reader). When I was fifteen and spent almost an entire summer
in bed, sick with mononucleosis, I gobbled up books by P. G. Wodehouse
(old-fashioned British comedy featuring Jeeves the butler) and Ian

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Fleming (Bond, James Bond). When my mother died last year, I found
respite from my grief in rereading books by Jane Austen, one of her all-
time favorite authors. When I’m going through tough times, or just want
to feel safe and secure, I love to revisit favorite books, the ones I’ve read
over and over again, almost every year of my life since I was a child (The
Secret Garden, Harriet the Spy, Half Magic, A Wrinkle in Time, Beezus
and Ramona, Understood Betsy, Tintin comics, The Jungle Book).
The world can be a challenging place—more so all the time, it seems.
We all need reliable friends, the kind who can be counted on to make us
feel better. People may come and go from our lives, but books, and read-
ing, will always be there. And that’s a comfort.

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62. Reading can be a shared experience

by Sarah Mlynowski

I fell in love with reading in the third grade. I devoured everything by


Judy Blume, Gordon Korman, and every series I could get my hands on.
Sweet Valley High! Fear Street! Nancy Drew! The Baby-sitters Club!
What I loved about those books was that they made me feel connected.
By book two, or even chapter two, I was meeting up and hanging out with
old friends, like Fudge, or Bruno and Boots, or Nancy, or Mary Anne,
Claudia, Stacey, and Kristy. No matter where I was—my bed, the back
seat of my parents’ car, my couch—if I had a book, I wasn’t alone.
The thing about books, though, is that they don’t just connect you to
fictional characters. They help connect you to real people, too.
My friends Jess and Karen were also voracious readers. We discussed
books we loved. We shared books we loved. We wanted to live in books
we loved. After reading The Friendship Pact by Susan Beth Pfeffer, we
wrote, performed, and recorded a forty-five-minute play based on the
novel. After reading the Baby-sitters Club, we debated which characters
we were most like. We decided I was a Kristy, Karen was a Stacey, and
Jess was a Claudia. We even started a baby-sitters club of our own. We
made flyers and hung them around town, and actually got baby-sitting
jobs, although because we were only in sixth grade, our parents made us
go in pairs. But still. It was like we were in the books. Together!
When you’re reading a novel, you’re sharing an experience. You are
not the only one crying at the end of Charlotte’s Web, or holding your
breath during Refugee, or laughing through Restart. There are kids—and
grown-ups—having the same feelings you are having about the same plot
twist, the same description, the same joke. So even if you’re reading
on your own, you’re never truly alone. These days when I read some-
thing amazing, I immediately text Jess and Karen: OMG are you reading

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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes? Let me know when you get to chap-
ter five.
I now have two daughters, Chloe, who is ten, and Anabelle, who is
seven. My favorite activity in the world is lying on the couch beside
them, all of us reading. My even more favorite activity is when we’re all
on the couch reading, and they’re curled up with books I’ve read and
loved. I try not to interrupt them every two minutes with questions:
“What part are you on? Were you surprised? Isn’t she the best?” But I
can’t always help myself.
Right now Chloe is reading her seventh Baby-sitters Club book.
Anabelle is reading her first.
Chloe is definitely a Kristy like me, but Anabelle is such a Mary Anne.

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63. Reading is a story in itself

by Jaclyn Moriarty

I grew up in Sydney, Australia, in a family of six children. We also had


two dogs, two horses, a cat, a duck, and twelve chickens.
My mother did a lot of laundry. Clothes were always pegged to the line
in our backyard. A note was always stuck to our fridge with a magnet:

If it rains, run for your life.

The note meant this: At the first sign of rain, you raced, like an
Olympic sprinter, to the line, and rescued the laundry.
One day, there was a terrible storm in Sydney.
The day of this storm, my mother collected my youngest sister, Nicola,
from high school. The sky was low with angry black clouds. Wind
whipped leaves against the car. Thunder grumbled.
The car reached our driveway and stopped outside the garage. Nicola
pressed the remote. The garage door opened.
And that’s when the first raindrops hit.
“The laundry!” shrieked my mother.
She and Nicola leapt from the car and tore around to the backyard.
They skidded to the clothesline. Their hands reached up—
I’ll stop the story for a moment here, to tell you something.
Reading is strange. It’s tangled up with the real world. There’s no clear
line saying: On this side is the story, and on that is true life. Instead,
there’s a fine, fine curtain between them, and it shivers and sways, loop-
ing back and forth between both.
In my home, we didn’t have a TV, but we did have a playroom. There
were daddy longlegs spiders in the corners, and a yellow bookcase against
the wall. The bookcase was filled with my mother’s collection of books
from when she was a child. The bookcase was the focus of our days.

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We didn’t just read the books. We talked about them. We acted out
scenes. Inspired by the characters in What Katy Did, we played Murder in
the Dark. (Our parents banned the game because somebody always ended
up smashing into something in the dark, and either breaking the object or
their toe. But we played it anyway, in secret, which was even better.)
Any unexplained mystery in our house—who drew on the back of
Dad’s important documents? Why was there no milk when Mum knew
she’d bought some?—turned us into detectives. We were Nancy Drew
collecting clues. We formed clubs based on the rules of the Secret Seven
club. After we’d read James and the Giant Peach, we ran outside and
got trapped in a giant’s jam sandwich. Most of the neighborhood kids
were trapped along with us (and they still talk about that sticky situation).
Sometimes our mother’s books themselves became the game. We played
Library, creating index cards for each book, and getting into screaming
fights over who got to be the librarian.
Then we turned into teenagers and packed the books away.
And that brings me back to the story.
My mother and sister raced to the backyard. Skidded to the clothes-
line. Their hands reached up, and—

BOOM!!!!

They froze.
The air shook and vibrated around them. The dogs barked, the horses
whinnied, the chickens squawked.
Mum and Nicola stared at each other.
And then they ran through the pouring rain back to the garage.
Only, the garage wasn’t there.
In its place was a giant pile of rubble.
Lightning had struck the wall and smashed the garage to smithereens.
If they hadn’t run for the laundry—if they’d driven into the garage—
they’d have been stepping out of the car exactly when it happened.

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Later that night, one of my sisters pointed out the note on the fridge:
If it rains, run for your life.
A chill ran through the room.

Later still, we remembered.


The books from the playroom had been packed in boxes in the garage.
Our childhood books—our mother’s childhood books—were now
crushed beneath a pile of muddy rubble.
It was sad, but also somehow right.
The books that had lit up our childhood were a story of their own. A
story that had ended, as good stories should, with a thunderclap.

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64. Reading, like a dog, can bring you great joy

by Robert Munsch

When I was four years old, I lived on a short, dead-end street called
Green Avenue. Cars were a rarity on Green Avenue and the street was
mostly a children’s playground.
I don’t remember adults saying, “Go play in the street,” but that is
what happened. So I went on explorations of the street. At the far end,
there was a lady who had a Scotty dog. Not only did she have a Scotty
dog, but she was so happy to have visitors, she always gave me milk and
cookies after I played with Angus in the backyard.
We didn’t have a dog. I became a sort of uncle to Angus.
One day my mother gave me a present. It wasn’t a birthday present or
a Christmas present. She explained it was a very special present, just for
me. I unwrapped it, and it was a book called Angus Lost, by Marjorie
Flack. The Scotty dog in the book looked exactly like my Angus.
My parents read many books to me, but this is the one I remember for
the great joy it gave me when I was four.
Fifty years later, I decided I needed to replace the book. I tracked it
down at a used bookstore in Australia. Bingo! I had the book.
Books let you go backward in time.

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65. Reading is an act of faith by Jon Muth

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66. Reading thrills with the wonder of language

by Walter Dean Myers

“Once I began to read, I began to exist.”


Reading, for as long as I can remember, has always been a good part
of my life. My reading habits as a young boy growing up in Harlem, New
York, were similar to those of every avid reader. Did I read everything I
could get my hands on? Of course I did. Did I read under the desk in
school? Certainly. Did I have the flashlight under the covers to finish just
one more chapter before falling asleep? Absolutely.
I can’t imagine my life without the books I’ve enjoyed and the plea-
sures of reading. As a child I was thrilled with the wonder of language.
I believe that my reading “mind” was prepared long before I came to
my first page of printed material. It began, and I am quite confident of
this, in the conversations I had with my foster mom in our tidy Harlem
apartment. My mother used to engage me in simple conversations as she
did the housework each day. She didn’t talk at me, she talked to me and
expected me to answer her. I remember her asking me what the weather
was like and how we should dress if we walked across 125th Street to the
market stalls under the train trestle. I would dutifully go to the window,
assess the weather, and decide what we should wear.
Sometimes she would ask me what I thought we might see on our
crosstown journey, and I, pleased to have my opinion heard, would tell
her. Would we take the crosstown trolley or walk? If I was asked I knew
it meant that Mama had money for the trolley. It was quite all right with
her if I made up something.
I remember Mama reading to me when I was five. Each day she would
do the usual housework, which consisted of cleaning anything that
needed cleaning, ironing anything that entertained the notion that it
could possibly harbor a wrinkle, and putting away everything in its
assigned place. Then, for that brief period between housework “done”

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and supper “started,” she would read. Her choice of reading was always
the same. True romance, love, heartbreak, jealousy, men as handsome as
princes, and women whose bosoms rose and fell breathlessly from page
to page. I didn’t understand much about romance but I loved that time
with Mama, sitting in our small kitchen, hearing her totally pleasant
voice as she read. Did I tell you I was a mama’s boy? I was.
What I knew about reading was that the print on the page was to be
decoded and that Mama and I could do it. And when we did it we could
enter the magical world of story. It allowed you to sit on your mother’s lap
and lean against her as you recreated the world in your own mind. Mama,
who had only gone as far as the third grade in the small school in
Pennsylvania she had attended, read with a finger moving slowly across
the page.
I don’t remember actually learning the decoding process. The vocabu-
lary of those True Love and True Romance magazines must have been
quite limited because I began recognizing printed words by the time I
was five. By six, I could read to Mama as she worked, and she would cor-
rect the words I didn’t know.
My father, Herbert Dean, did not read. That tragedy wouldn’t catch up
with me for decades. I was a mama’s boy.

This selection was assembled from excerpts of Walter Dean Myers’s


2009 Arbuthnot Lecture.

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67. Reading is for rebels

by Jennifer A. Nielsen

In the 1970s, high fashion was the combination of brown, orange, and
mustard. Star Wars made its debut. Also, I entered kindergarten.
Back then, few incoming students knew how to read. Kindergarten
was the time to learn ABCs and maybe, if we worked really hard, we’d
get around to basic words such as stop and go, which meant to me, “Stop
learning and go take a nap.”
But thanks to the teaching instincts of my older brother, I started that
all-important year as a reader. I couldn’t wait to dive into every book in
the school.
There was only one problem:
I may have been assigned to the one teacher in the history of the uni-
verse who wasn’t equally excited.
“You can learn to read in the first grade,” she told me. “If you try to
read now, you might do it wrong.”
Wrong? Even at age five, that didn’t make sense to me. Every Sesame
Street episode I’d ever seen clearly stated that reading was wonderful.
Even Oscar the Grouch said so.
Yet my teacher asked that I only look at the pictures of those books. But
how could I stare at the words and pretend I didn’t know what they said?
That very day, I made a decision to engage in the biggest rebellion of
my life . . . well, up to age five.
I began sneak-reading. I mastered the art of pretending to look at pic-
tures, while secretly I was reading every single word. Stop and go began to
take on new meanings. Such as: “Never stop reading. Go get another book.”
Maybe that’s what my teacher meant by learning to read wrong.
Sneak-reading had a deep impact on me. It bonded me to books as
perhaps nothing else could, because even in that small way, I had to fight
for my right to read.

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Little did I know then that others had fought for that same right, long
before I ever did.
In 1842, teachers at the School for the Blind in Paris were ordered to
burn their books written in Braille. They refused, risking their jobs and
reputations, to protect the right of their students to read.
In 1948, the US government banned all comic books that refused to
comply with their censorship guidelines, forcing many comic book writ-
ers into the underground. One young comic book writer defied the ban,
eventually ending the regulations. His name was Stan Lee.
And in the 1800s, when the Russian Empire banned all Lithuanian-
language books in that small country, the book smugglers rose up. These
brave people left their country to get books printed in their own lan-
guage. Then, at great personal risk, they smuggled them back inside their
borders.
To do so was very dangerous. If they were caught—and many were—
it often meant a one-way trip to Siberia, a prison of ice and snow. My
book Words on Fire tells their story.
Writing the book began with this question: Why would people risk
everything they had, even their own lives, for books?
I found my answer back in my kindergarten class, in the eyes of five-
year-old me, sitting at a kindergarten table conducting the greatest
rebellion of my life.
Defying my teacher for my right to read.
And in my own small and insignificant way, I suppose I became a
book smuggler too.

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68. Reading is a magic portal

by Garth Nix

When I was seven years old, I discovered the small library I had been
visiting for years was more magical than I had ever known. I was in
grade three at Turner Primary School in Canberra, Australia. For the first
time I was allowed to walk to and from school. This was the late 1960s
and Canberra was a very small city; there weren’t many cars, and all the
kids walked or rode their bikes.
Near the school there was a small street of shops, with a butcher, a
newspaper shop, a sweet shop (where we’d buy two chocolate-covered
caramels called cobbers for one cent), a general store, and . . . a children’s
library.
The library was small, not much more than a garden shed packed from
floor to ceiling with books. I already loved it and had been visiting with
my mother for years, once a week or so. I’d started there with picture
books by John Burningham, Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Tomie dePaola,
and many more, moving on to chapter books and even actual novels. I
often couldn’t really understand the bigger books but I wanted to read
them anyway. Later on, I’d read a lot of these books again. Maybe this is
where my lifelong habit of rereading favorite books began. I recommend
this, because you can often get something different from a book when
you read it again, particularly as you get older.
But I didn’t really know what that library and the librarians in it could
do until I did start walking home by myself in third grade and stopped
off every day to return the book or books I’d read overnight and get
new ones.
By this stage I’d read pretty much everything that tempted me on the
shelves and I eagerly awaited the books that would appear on the “New
Books” shelf.

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Then, one day, I discovered that library didn’t simply hold the books I
could see on the shelves. I’d been reading an author who later would
become a favorite. I can’t remember exactly who it was. It might have
been Susan Cooper, Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner, Lloyd Alexander,
Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Rosemary Sutcliff, Joan Aiken,
Elisabeth Beresford, Edward Eager, E. Nesbit . . . any one of these or
many others.
Whoever it was, I asked the librarian if there were any more books by
that writer. I meant in the library, even though I’d already looked myself.
She replied with a magic incantation.
“Not here, but we will get them in for you.”
It was only then I understood. That tiny library, with perhaps two or
three hundred books, was connected to the bigger libraries, and those
libraries to other libraries, to a whole world of books. Thousands of
books, hundreds of thousands of books. Maybe millions of books.
The library was a portal to other worlds. Worlds full of books, and
those books contained other worlds in themselves as well. Every time I
read one I was taken somewhere else, to real or imagined places different
to my own, with amazing people doing incredible things. I could live
other lives through books, and learn all kinds of things while simply
enjoying a story.
That small children’s library and all the books it brought to me have
helped make me the person I am today. My reading life, as much as my
actual life, has given me experiences that have guided my choices, have
equipped me to understand and deal with opportunities and difficulties,
from the smallest daily struggles to the big challenges. I read because I
love to, but it has many benefits as well.
Reading also made me a writer. If you want to write, this is how it
starts and continues, with reading. I hope you will be as lucky as I was,
to have a magical library, a book-loving family, and access to all the
books in the vast universe of wonderful reading.

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69. Reading may be hard, but it’s worth the trip

by Michael Northrop

For some people, reading comes easy. They’re handed the right book as a
kid, and away they go on a lifelong magic carpet ride of the imagination.
Or something like that. Being an author, and often surrounded by very
bookish people, I hear that story a lot. The metaphor varies (and is usu-
ally better), but the story remains the same.
Notably absent is any talk of the first step in that journey: the actual
process of learning to read. The mental mechanics. When I think of
what that process must have been like for these lifelong avid readers, I
imagine that scene in A Christmas Story: “A plus plus plus plus!”
I have a different story. For me, that first step was a doozy. I am dys-
lexic. I repeated a grade and spent some time in special education. It was
difficult and sometimes frustrating. I remember sitting at a small desk in
the corner of a warm, sunny room and reading the same few Dick and
Jane–type books over and over and over again. See Michael snore.
Most of all, it was isolating. After my second year in second grade, I
was a year older than my classmates. For the rest of my childhood, I was
terrified they would find out why. Held back. Special ed. I guarded these
secrets fiercely. For years, I didn’t even have birthday parties. I was too
afraid of the words “How old are you now?”
Eventually, though, I began reading for fun. I was tricked into it by a
game and some snappy costumes. The game was Dungeons & Dragons.
I loved immersing myself in those imaginary adventures so much that it
barely occurred to me that poring over and puzzling out the rulebooks
even qualified as reading.
The snappy costumes belonged to superheroes. (My outfits, heavy on
brown corduroys, were decidedly non-snappy.) Comic books were popu-
lar with my friends, available on a rack at the local pharmacy
and—amazingly, miraculously—accessible to me. In fact, with their

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sparse, economical captions and emphasis on visual storytelling, I could
read them nearly as fast as my classmates could. For the first time I was
literally on the same page as my friends when it came to reading. The
isolation began to crack.
Next came poetry. I liked it because it’s short and you have to read it
slowly and carefully—which was the only way I could read. Then came
short stories. I was getting better at reading and enjoying it more. By high
school, I was reading novels for fun, chugging through them slowly and
diligently. I still sought out short books (I still do). If it had a front
and back cover, it counted, and I loved that little victory of reaching the
end of even the shortest book. Somehow, improbably, English had
become my favorite subject.
And so, finally, bumpily, my little threadbare magic carpet arrived. I
love it so. And I’m not alone. The more open I am about my early strug-
gles with reading, the more people I hear from who shared them, in one
form or another. From learning disabilities to second languages, there are
many barriers. For some of us, reading is a joy not because it was always
easy, but because it was difficult. It was a mountain that we had to climb,
that we still climb, even if we find ourselves a few hundred yards behind
the pack. Why do we climb that mountain? I guess we just like the view.

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70. Reading takes you deeply into its world

by Daniel José Older

One of the first times I fell in love with reading, I was in Florida on a
family vacation and bored out of my mind. The most exciting thing
around was right in front of me, in the pages of The Fellowship of the
Ring. There, some hobbits were trying to make a desperate escape from
hooded riders on the outskirts of a small town on a rainy night. The riders
had been trailing them for a while; they were terrifying and mysterious
and I’d never read anything like it in my life, never felt so completely
inside a book. What would happen next? What if the hobbits were caught?
I had to keep reading.
The rain fell in sheets and the night was impossibly dark. Our heroes
had never left their small hometown; the world suddenly seemed so much
larger to them than it ever had before. Larger and much, much more ter-
rifying. As the hooded riders drew ever closer, I looked up and blinked.
The Florida sun shone brightly through the window, cast long shadows
along the floor. I blinked. It wasn’t raining; it wasn’t even night! How?
My brain had fallen so deeply into the world of hobbits and rings that
it took a few seconds for the world of sunshine and family vacations to
kick in. It was such a small moment, but I remember how far away from
the window I was sitting when it happened, what the chair felt like
beneath me, the particular quality of afternoon light that happens when
the sun sinks low enough to look eye to eye with those tall buildings
by the sea. Somewhere inside, I knew that the moment had changed me,
that a new kind of magic had revealed itself, and the world would never
be the same again.

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70. Reading takes you deeply into its world

by Daniel José Older

One of the first times I fell in love with reading, I was in Florida on a
family vacation and bored out of my mind. The most exciting thing
around was right in front of me, in the pages of The Fellowship of the
Ring. There, some hobbits were trying to make a desperate escape from
hooded riders on the outskirts of a small town on a rainy night. The riders
had been trailing them for a while; they were terrifying and mysterious
and I’d never read anything like it in my life, never felt so completely
inside a book. What would happen next? What if the hobbits were caught?
I had to keep reading.
The rain fell in sheets and the night was impossibly dark. Our heroes
had never left their small hometown; the world suddenly seemed so much
larger to them than it ever had before. Larger and much, much more ter-
rifying. As the hooded riders drew ever closer, I looked up and blinked.
The Florida sun shone brightly through the window, cast long shadows
along the floor. I blinked. It wasn’t raining; it wasn’t even night! How?
My brain had fallen so deeply into the world of hobbits and rings that
it took a few seconds for the world of sunshine and family vacations to
kick in. It was such a small moment, but I remember how far away from
the window I was sitting when it happened, what the chair felt like
beneath me, the particular quality of afternoon light that happens when
the sun sinks low enough to look eye to eye with those tall buildings
by the sea. Somewhere inside, I knew that the moment had changed me,
that a new kind of magic had revealed itself, and the world would never
be the same again.

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by Molly Knox Ostertag

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72. Reading can lead you to your dream job

by Micol Ostow

It was 1999. I was twenty-three, and working as an editorial assistant for


a small, serious publisher of very serious, important nonfiction books.
After college, I’d applied for jobs in women’s magazines and publishing.
And when an offer came from a huge publishing house, I jumped.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that as much as I loved books,
I definitely wasn’t serious enough for the division of the company where I
was working. Slowly, I started to wonder if I belonged in book publishing
at all.
Didn’t editors have to be very, very serious about their books, all the
time, in order to publish serious, important books that would change
people’s lives?
That was my fear. But it was misguided. And improbably, it was Buffy
the Vampire Slayer who came to my rescue.
A friend who worked in the production department knew I was a huge
fan of the show. When one of our mysterious, cloistered paperback divi-
sions released a companion guide to the show, she left a copy on my desk
as a gift. I couldn’t believe such an intensely comprehensive book about
a television show existed in the world. More to the point—it was a fun
book, in spite of being richly detailed and rigorous.
I had to know who at this company was creating books like this one.
Fortunately, the name of the editor who’d worked on the book was listed
on the inner copyright page. I memorized it, fantasizing about one day
meeting this beautiful genius.
Six months later, I was looking for jobs in magazines—I’d given up on
being a “serious” nonfiction editor. I was sure, by that point, that I was in
the wrong line of work.
And then.

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I was waiting for an elevator when I saw a sign listing new jobs in the
company. Specifically, I noticed an opening in one of our paperback
divisions—Pocket Books. I decided to apply for the job.
Little did I know, I’d applied to assist the very same editor of that Buffy
book I’d fallen in love with.
Thrilled as I was to finally be meeting that editor, it was only when I
walked into her office that I realized I’d stumbled into the holy land—a
place where fun books were taken very, very seriously. Her shelves were
filled with names of authors I remembered from my sleepaway camp
days. Christopher Pike. Francine Pascal. Bruce Coville. It was an entire
category of books I’d completely forgotten since aging out of sleepaway
camp. And remembering it was no less than magical.
It was the dream job I’d never known I’d wanted. It was kismet. And
as it turned out, I am extremely serious about books—but particularly the
fun ones. I edited them for a long time before I began writing my own.
And I realized that in fact, books are where I’ve always belonged.

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73. Reading is a special superpower

by Rodman Philbrick

I was eleven years old when my own special superpower was revealed to
me. My younger brother and I were avidly reading Eleanor Cameron’s
Mushroom Planet books, about two boys who build a spaceship and voy-
age to a nearby planet. Like the boys in the book, we decided to build a
spaceship of our own, out of old boiler parts and pieces of junk. Luckily
my mother interrupted us before we got to the gunpowder rocket-fuel
stage. But the books unleashed in me not only a craving for more books,
but an understanding that stories can be powerful things that extend into
the real world. Instinctively I understood that books could change my
life. That same year I came across The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton
Juster, and the deal was done. I knew who and what I wanted to be. An
author! In sixth grade, I secretly began to write stories and send them out
to magazines—secretly, because I thought announcing I was a writer
would set me apart, as indeed it would have in the very small town where
I grew up.
My dream of getting published and joining the ranks of the writers I
so admired did not come easily, as it almost never does. Possibly because
I began with absolutely no clue about how to write a publishable story.
We all know the only way to get to Carnegie Hall is to practice, practice,
practice, and the only way to acquire the skills of a professional writer is
to write, write, write. And read, read, read. And then write some more,
learning how to focus your imagination, coaxing your characters to life.
For me the reading was what drove the writing. One could not exist
without the other. There were no creative writing courses available to me.
Books were where I learned how to listen, observe, and study. They were
my own private university. My instructors were Mark Twain, Joseph
Conrad, Ray Bradbury, and Ursula Le Guin. Guest lecturers included
Flannery O’Connor, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Flann O’Brien, and Louisa

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May Alcott. Raymond Chandler was a regular at the student pub, as was
Joseph Heller. (They used to arm wrestle, but neither of them ever won.)
The winner was me, sitting in a corner, observing and absorbing.
Learning by reading, by letting a chorus of author voices show me how it
was done.
In middle school I wrote hundreds of short stories and poems. All
were rejected. I wrote what I thought was a novel in high school. Not
good enough to find a publisher. I did have a poem published in an actual
magazine in my senior year of high school, and found that I was too
embarrassed to show it to anybody. After struggling through nine unpub-
lished novels, I finally figured out how to write in a way that engaged the
reader, and was eventually able to earn a living doing the thing I love
most in the world.
So thank you, authors; thank you, books. I couldn’t have done it with-
out your help and inspiration. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

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as was Joseph Heller. (They used to arm wrestle, but neither of them
ever won.) The winner was me, sitting in a corner, observing and absorb-
ing. Learning by reading, by letting a chorus of author voices show me
how it was done.
In middle school I wrote hundreds of short stories and poems. All
were rejected. I wrote what I thought was a novel in high school. Not
good enough to find a publisher. I did have a poem published in an actual
magazine in my senior year of high school, and found that I was too
embarrassed to show it to anybody. After struggling through nine unpub-
lished novels, I finally figured out how to write in a way that engaged the
reader, and was eventually able to earn a living doing the thing I love
most in the world.
So thank you, authors; thank you, books. I couldn’t have done it with-
out your help and inspiration. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

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75. Reading is a bouquet on paper

by Andrea Davis Pinkney

Dear Langston Hughes,

Do you know what you’ve done?

You are the one


who saw this Black girl struggling
to see herself
on the pages of the books she read.

That’s right,
her brown-skinned dreams,
they just weren’t there
in the stories that weren’t her story.

No, un-uh,
this girl’s reflection didn’t shine
in the book-mirrors
she was given.

It was 1976.
This child was lonely.
And hungry.
And the only one
in her classroom
who had brown-girl cheeks
and eyes wide open in a world
that didn’t seem to notice
she needed to read books that said: You. Are. Here.

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And so,
her reading hunger grew.

And so,
she wanted words that could feed
the deepest places
of a starving soul,
wanting stories that spoke her truth.

To make matters worse,


the rumbling way down in her belly
made her swallow hard,
and brought on a tummy ache
she came to call
“That Day When I Felt the Pain of Not Wanting to Read.”

But then—hello!—you came.

Langston Hughes.

Bringing good news!

It was a spring afternoon when you knocked on my heart’s


front door.

And there it was. A special delivery. Just for me.

A book!
Your book!
And my book, too.

Yours and mine.

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That book, filled with your poems, was ours.

Because, you see, Langston, you saw me.

Through you, Langston Hughes,


I felt the power of we.

Through you, Langston Hughes,


I learned to love to read.

The book, that book.


Its title was simple.
But its gifts were a plentiful mix of everything I needed.

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

That book selected this kid who’d been in pain.


That book chose me,
and changed me
and saved my life as a reader.

That book.
given to me by a special teacher.

Like you, Langston, she knew what I needed.

That book,
with its curled pages
and warped cover,
stained and decorated with library dust,
was the mirror that nourished the growling,
empty places deep down in me.

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Langston Hughes,
in the wide-open eyes of this sweet-cheeked child,
your poetry’s power made reading come alive.

Your word-music filled me up,


made me love to read.

You invited us to hold fast to dreams.

You introduced beautiful Ruby Brown, golden like the


sunshine.

You showed everyone the wonder of a crimson trickle in the


Georgia dusk.

You, Langston Hughes,


painted a bouquet filled with the colors of Cuba, Haiti, Harlem,
Jamaica, and the Bronx.

Like the brightest flower,


that book—our book—met me face-to-face,
nose-to-nose,
smelling so fine.

Your bouquet-on-paper
was as bright as the warmest day in May.

When you, Langston Hughes, came to call,


hunger’s roar slipped away.

Bye-bye, brown girl in pain.


Hello, blooming middle school poet!

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Time to grow away from the growling, empty ache.
Time to gobble up books!
Time to chow down on reading!

Dear Langston Hughes,


I still own that dusty, tattered, selected poetry collection.

(Never returned what has now become my BBF—my Best


Book Friend.)

And speaking of bests,


here’s the best part of your May Day book-bouquet
and the selections that you, Langston Hughes, always deliver:

Somewhere, right now,


your words are lighting up the eyes and filling the bellies
of budding poets
who are spreading their petals to others.

And together, we see ourselves.


And together, we love to read!

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76. Reading puts a light in your eyes

by Sharon Robinson

My love of reading began as a child. A good book exposed me to a world


beyond my own experience. Stories brought clarity of past struggles and
achievements to life. I related to any story with adventurous female pro-
tagonists. My mother encouraged this love for books by creating a library
in our home and reading books with us before bedtime. If we asked her a
question or begged for a new dog, Mom sent us to the set of encyclope-
dias to do research before she’d seriously entertain our request.
But . . . most of the characters in the books of my childhood were
white. Honestly, I didn’t realize what was missing until my freshman
year at Howard University. Our assigned readings expanded my thinking
and spoke to my heritage. I devoured Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It made
me unafraid of my own transformation since arriving at this incredible
black college. At nineteen, I was away from home for the first time and
enjoying the freedom to move about the world in a new, unrecognizable
form. That same year I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Maya
Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Books that spoke to me as
a young black woman. Stories that drew me out of isolation and into the
light.
Now, as a children’s book author, I’ve seen that same light in chil-
dren’s eyes during a reading from and discussion of one of my stories.
Like the girls who look up to me in surprise and wonder at my honesty in
Child of the Dream: A Memoir of 1963. I imagine them thinking, Did she
just say that out loud?
I love reading letters from young readers. One of them wrote: “I
learned that you’re an activist. I have a ‘Dream Big.’ I want to stop child
abuse. It really HURTS me more than it hurts them.” Fans of The Hero
Two Doors Down write and tell me that they are like the main character,
Steve Satlow. Boys and girls who put themselves in Steve’s place and

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imagine becoming friends with their favorite sports star. And there are
letters that talk about Jackie Robinson and ask deep and basic questions
about the man they’ve learned to admire. Many are relieved that their idol
was also a loving father.
Books can entertain, lift our spirits, inspire us to make a difference,
and be the best person we can be. I recently received a letter from a fifth
grader from New York. He wrote, “I am writing to you regarding permis-
sion to use some information from your book, Promises to Keep, in my
book. When I am done with the book, I am going to send it into Scholastic
in New York City to try and get it published.”
I hope he does.

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77. Reading leads to fantastic collaborations

by Madelyn Rosenberg and Wendy Wan-Long Shang

E-readers, those slim devices that serve as an all-you-can-read buffet, are


a great invention. You can get a new book when you finish a book at ten
o’clock at night—without getting out of bed. You can go on vacation
without lugging a bag just for books (hey—we like to be prepared!).
But let’s face it, e-readers have one major drawback:
It’s hard to see what other people are reading. Even if you’re wearing
your glasses. Even if you tilt your head and twist your body and lean. You
can’t read the title, or even see the cover to give you the faintest idea of
what the book is about.
A book is like a badge, a T-shirt that says i love sloths or recycle. It
tells you what a person is interested in. If you spot someone reading a
worn-out copy of your favorite book, the chances of you becoming
friends go up exponentially.
We met in a writers’ critique group, which is an interesting way to get
to know a person. Sharing your writing, opening yourself up to criticism,
offering your thoughts on someone else’s writing—it’s a crash course in
Getting to Know You on a Deep Level. We ended up getting the same
literary agent, and sold our first books within a few months of each other.
We liked what we saw in each other’s writing, so it was only a matter
of time until we got the idea to write a book together. Writing with a
partner is a risk, though. A leap of faith. So a little sign that we were
meant to do this? We’d take it.
We were having one of our many rambling conversations, engaging
in what Madelyn calls Playing Tennis Badly, when the subject of young
adult novels came up. When we were growing up, the category of
“young adult” books was not the healthy genre it is today. After a cer-
tain age, you slipped into the adult section—or, in our case, you stole
books off your mother’s nightstand.

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As we came to find out, we had stolen the same book, Class Reunion,
from our moms as one of our first forays into adult books. Class Reunion
is about four women who go to college together, and about their very dif-
ferent lives afterward.
We had our confirmation that we should write together, and from that
partnership came This Is Just a Test, a book about a Chinese-Jewish boy
named David Da-Wei Horowitz who worries about his bar mitzvah, his
battling friends, and, you know, world peace. While we were editing, we
talked in half sentences. We could decipher each other’s barely coherent
texts and emails. When we turned the book in, our own agents said they
could not tell who had written what, and with very few exceptions, nei-
ther could we.
Then, for our first presentation on Test together, we independently cre-
ated collages of books we loved as kids. We had three of the same books,
down to the covers. As a bonus, we’d each picked a Judy Blume book. It
was another sign. Who were we to ignore the fates? We wrote another
book together, Not Your All-American Girl, about David’s younger sister,
Lauren. It’s about figuring out who you could be, over the noise of so
many people trying to tell you, rightly or wrongly, who you should be. The
cover is purple, like our own dog-eared copies of Are You There, God? It’s
Me, Margaret. If you see someone carrying it, we hope you’ll strike up a
conversation. You might find a partner in crime. Or a lifelong friend.

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78. Reading is a rope in a deep well

by Pam Muñoz Ryan

I wasn’t always a reader. I didn’t grow up with many books in my home


and I don’t have memories of people reading to me. It wasn’t until the
summer before fifth grade that books and reading captured me.
My family had moved across town and I was new to the neighbor-
hood. On one of my bike rides, I discovered the small East Bakersfield
Branch library near my house. Initially, it was nothing more than a desti-
nation and not necessarily a place I went to read. It was someplace to
which I could say I was going, and not be questioned by my parents. I was
by myself, without my little sisters. It was quiet. Best of all, in the
107-degree heat of the San Joaquin Valley, it was air-conditioned.
It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the books would hold me hos-
tage. Stories are powerful that way. I wanted to know what came next. I
wanted to turn the page. I didn’t want the story to end. As I walked
between the stacks, I sometimes imagined that adventures were waiting
to leap from the confines of the books so they could grab me and pull me
in. Eventually, that’s exactly what happened, with The Swiss Family
Robinson by Johann David Wyss, Treasure Island by Robert Louis
Stevenson, and dozens by Marguerite Henry, including Misty of
Chincoteague.
Reading kidnapped me. I carried books to kitchen tables, to the car,
and (secretly) to church. I was as strong, adventurous, and determined as
the protagonists in the stories. Or as long-suffering. I tried on many lives
other than my own and hung on to stories I loved, reading them over and
over, as if they were a rope in a deep well.
Recently, I ran into the woman who had been my best friend during
seventh and eighth grade. She reminded me that when we walked home
from school together, I sometimes read out loud to her. I had forgotten! I
suppose because I was lost in the book and everything else was

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incidental. But to her, it was still a vivid memory. She admitted that after
I read chapters to her, she would often go to the library and check out the
same book so she could read it in its entirety. Without knowing, I tempted
her curiosity, and she was caught, too.
As I made my way through junior high, books carried me away, at
least temporarily, from the wrath of mean girls, isolation, tallness, big
feet, miserably hot weather, and a town that late-night talk show hosts
called “the armpit of the world.” It wasn’t, at least to me. I coped through
books, discovering them at a time of my life when I was insecure, strug-
gled socially, and was searching for how and where I belonged in the
world.
It is no surprise that I now often write for readers who are the same
age that I was when books made the biggest difference in my life.

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79. Reading gives breath to a new whisper

by Aida Salazar

We read to listen to the whispers of universes we have never


known.

We read to unfasten the clasp of memory trembling with


excitement to be set free.

We read to find joy laughing out loud in the rain beneath a


polka-dot umbrella.

We read to pull back the truth like blankets off a sleepyhead


baby brother.

We read to witness beauty bloom delicate as dew on a blade


of grass.

We read to bend with time like taffy in our mouth.

We read to excavate questions waiting like blue sea glass


buried in the sand.

We read to stuff our faces with suspense like popcorn at a movie.

We read the map others have traveled and see our own
crooked prints speckled on the paths.

We read to awaken the ghosts asleep in our basements.

We read to fill our minds from the well of inspiration, bucket


after bucket.

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We read to hear the voices of our ancestors sing a lullaby in a
language we don’t remember.

We read to feel loss burst open our hearts with a sudden,


painful theft.

We read to marvel at how love can mend what is broken in us.

We read to learn a secret folded into a paper airplane and


flung through the air.

We read to see heroes emerge like triumphant birds from


smoldering ash.

We read to meet goodness for a warm pancake breakfast.

We read to unravel the tangle of a problem and wind its


solution into a perfect ball of yarn.

We read to know that ugly and pretty are twins who bicker
for the front seat.

We read to make ourselves big with courage, look into the


eyes of fear, and send it blasting into space.

We read to be lifted with power as justice does the right thing.

We read because we might just discover the story inside


ourselves.

Then, perhaps, find the freedom to write it for others to read.

And give breath to a new whisper in the universe.

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80. Reading can take you to different times
and places

by Lisa Ann Sandell

I have always loved books that transported me to other times, other


places. Growing up, I often felt like I didn’t fit in, like I was an outsider.
So I looked to books to help me escape my reality. And in those moments,
reading enabled me to forget about the troubles I was having with friends
or bullies or school; I could dive into a story that let me travel in my
imagination and shed all the worries that plagued me.
Stories of magic and adventure, of comradeship and characters who
were on a quest to do something brave or beautiful, were my favorites.
These types of stories moved me. And they still do.
I read hungrily and I read broadly—from Lloyd Alexander’s high fan-
tasy quintet, the Chronicles of Prydain, and Edward Eager’s stories of
enchanting adventures happening to regular kids in his Tales of Magic
books, to the dreamy magic of Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting and the
startling brilliance of Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet, and far beyond.
The first time (of many) I read A Wrinkle in Time, I can still remember
being struck, as if by a bolt of literary lightning, when I came upon this
passage:

“Just be glad you’re a kitten and not a monster like me.” She
looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror and made a horrible
face, baring a mouthful of teeth covered with braces.
Automatically she pushed her glasses into position, ran her
fingers through her mouse-brown hair, so that it stood wildly
on end, and let out a sigh almost as noisy as the wind.

I had never read a character who expressed the exact same self-critical
feelings that I harbored. Seeing myself in Meg Murry was earth-shattering.

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For the first time, I began to feel that maybe I wasn’t alone, maybe I
wasn’t a freak. That maybe there wasn’t something wrong with me.
Perhaps most importantly, this book, and all the others I devoured, let me
see that the world, that life, held so many possibilities. That things could
always get better and magic might turn up around any corner.
But it was the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round
Table that completely beguiled me. I loved the notion of a king who
longed to build a better, more just land. The fact that these legends held
up the ideals of justice and equality, honor and friendship as most essen-
tial, most meaningful, resonated deeply with me. These themes spoke of
a better world than the one I saw around me, where people could be cruel
and things seemed frequently, terribly unfair. But as I grew older, I
started to wonder where the female characters in these Arthurian stories
were. The women were featured as villains at worst (such as Morgan le
Fay or Guinevere, who in turning her affections to Lancelot, her hus-
band’s best friend, is ultimately responsible for Arthur’s and Camelot’s
demise); and they were victims, weak and helpless, at best (such as Elaine
of Astolat, also known as the Lady of Shalott).
My favorite bit of storytelling magic? In reading so much and loving
books so fervently, I was eventually inspired to tell my own stories. I got
to explore the legend of Arthur anew, and in my own way—through the
eyes of a female protagonist—in my novel Song of the Sparrow.
For every reader, young and old, I have one wish: May you, too, find
inspiration and, above all, hope in all the stories the world has to offer.

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81. Reading is human

by Allen Say

Before I learned what “aphorism” meant, I read one I never forgot:


Humans who don’t read are half humans. The stinging words comforted
me because I was reading books when I should have been earning my
daily meals.
Whoever said it made me wish I had thanked my mother for teaching
me to read when I was five. Actually, she was trying to find a way to
stop me from drawing on walls or running away from home, and reading
worked. Books and scrap paper made me happy; I didn’t need
playmates.
When I was twelve, I lived alone in a one-room apartment in Tokyo,
made two friends, and read the first Japanese translation of The Voyages
of Doctor Dolittle. The adventures of the chubby English doctor who
could speak with birds and animals filled me with enchantment I didn’t
know in real life.
At sixteen I left my boyhood in Japan and reset my life in America.
Conversation in English was a three-step act: decide what to say;
translate in the head; say the words like Humphrey Bogart. Hoots and
taunts. I never got over the stage fright.
For reading, I started with picture books for children—Babar the
Elephant and The Story of Ferdinand are two I remember. I was a five-
year-old again.
As I moved on to books without pictures, I got helplessly lost in a bor-
rowed dictionary—looking up one word led to looking up ten new words
that led to . . . I never returned the dictionary. Doctor Dolittle was writ-
ten in English; I had to learn it.
One day I caught myself thinking in English. That was progress, but it
made me think backward. I wondered how I could say an odd English
phrase like “raining cats and dogs” in Japanese. That complicated my

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reading: two languages overlapped on the page and made unexpected
patterns as on a double-exposed photograph. A reader with only one
language wouldn’t see it. I thought about writing my own stories.
I looked up at the mountain of English words and got altitude fright.
Then I heard a voice in my head: Tell your stories with drawings and put
captions on them. Picture books! I would be a kind of ventriloquist with
pictures as his dummy. When the dummy breathes and talks, the audi-
ence doesn’t see the ventriloquist. I wrote some captions and got off the
stage. Let the dummy do the talking.
And here I am back on the stage and asked what books meant in my
life. Stage panic at eighty-two . . . then my old habit turns the big ques-
tion around: If I hadn’t read the books I had read, what difference would
that have made to my life?
Books are the maps for the journeys of your mind and heart.
Without them, I would be an armchair explorer with no place to
explore: I wouldn’t have seen the great lighthouse of ancient Alexandria
or the domes of Samarkand or walked to the end of the Silk Road.
Saddest of all, I wouldn’t have met the many unforgettable people
made of words I could have gotten to know by reading their minds and
hearts.
Take away reading from my biography and you’ll have a nameless old
man in a flat world with short history and no enchantment. A half human.

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82. Reading can turn a classroom into
a magic carpet

by Augusta Scattergood

I grew up in a small southern town where we spent summers roller-skating


and playing baseball in the park, swimming in our town pool, and playing
hopscotch and tag till dark. In the winter we had no snow or ice-covered
ponds. Until my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wiggins, read Hans Brinker, or
The Silver Skates, I didn’t know anybody who owned a pair of ice skates,
much less knew what to do with them. But while she read that book, all
twenty-five of the kids in my class were holding up the dike and saving our
families right along with the characters. I was ten, and the only time I’d
traveled that far was inside the pages of a book.
Almost every day, often after recess with the window shades pulled
down and our spelling lists tucked inside our desks, all the people and the
pets inside the pages of Tom Sawyer, Old Yeller, or Call It Courage
became our friends. My teachers read books aloud—all the time. The
Mississippi River flowed not far from my town. We swam in its oxbow
lakes, caught catfish from the muddy banks, even dreamed of river raft-
ing. It was high school when a teacher opened The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn and took us up that river.
If I chose a book to read to myself, it was likely Nancy Drew or a
biography about a famous person. But if Miss Cane or Mrs. Turner or Mr.
Lipe or anyone read a book aloud, it didn’t matter if it was mystery or
history or anything in between. I couldn’t wait to listen. Soldiers went to
war, someone dear died in Little Women, dogs died in lots of stories. And
when our teacher got to the sad parts, all of us, even the toughest boy
who’d hit fly balls on the playground minutes ago, dropped our heads to
our desks and wiped away secret tears.
After the teacher tucked the bookmark into the end of a chapter
and raised the window shades, sun poured in. The blackboard, erasers, and

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chalk were still there and the globe hadn’t moved from its corner. The
classroom hadn’t changed. We had. Listening, we’d been somewhere
special. We’d painted a fence, loved a horse, skated to win.
Later, as a librarian, I read Bridge to Terabithia and cried right along
with my fifth graders. Recently, I read Merci Suárez Changes Gears to a
young friend and remembered the stories my own grandmother told.
Now, as an author, I read for inspiration. Flora & Ulysses and Love That
Dog and Shiloh and my favorite, about a pup-on-the-loose named
Wishbone—they all remind me of why I love reading. It started with the
excitement and delight in hearing stories read to me. It started when a
teacher turned our classroom into a magic carpet, sweeping us to places
we’d never been.

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83. Reading can help you survive

by Eliot Schrefer

A few years ago I was visiting a teacher friend in Seattle, and she invited
me to talk to her class about my books. On the drive to her school, she
told me about how almost all her students were refugees from Cambodia,
and that their families were struggling to make ends meet, so often the
students would drop out of school in order to work to financially support
their parents. I started to feel worried. Who was I to talk about the love
of reading when these kids didn’t have time to go to school, much less
read books?
Still, I went ahead with my presentation, about my book Endangered,
which is a survival story about a girl surviving wartime in Congo with an
orphan ape by her side. I show research videos of my time in Africa dur-
ing that presentation. The videos of apes being goofballs, which usually
get audiences laughing, were met with no reactions.
Feeling sheepish, I asked if the kids had any questions. There was just
a long silence.
Then, finally, one of the boys raised his hand and asked, “If a chim-
panzee and a gorilla got in a fight, who would win?”
“Oh,” I stammered. “I guess the gorilla, because they’re stronger.”
“Okay, okay, what if it was three chimps against two gorillas, but they
had a little monkey sidekick, too?”
We did this for a while—primate cage-match questions.
A shy young woman in the front raised her hand, then asked, “If the
bonobo apes have these female alliances that keep everyone safe, is there
any way that humans could do the same thing, to prevent war?”
I was stunned by the question, especially coming from someone
whose family had fled wartime to come to a new country. This wasn’t an
academic or poetic question—it was a matter of personal life strategies,

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of figuring out how to survive from a work of literature. The cage-match
questions had been a version of the same thing.
As I took some pictures with the students and said goodbye, I realized
that I’d been making some wrong assumptions. I’d thought that students
will only read if their essential needs are met, and that we need to help
students really struggling to find the space to start reading. But that’s not
really it. Those students fighting for survival also need books during that
fight. As a writer, I don’t get to decide what they take out of the book.
They’ll find what’s useful for them in it. That’s what humans do with
stories.

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84. Reading is a magic you can experience
and create

by Victoria Schwab

I did not grow up loving books. I could read well enough, but by the age
of eleven, I hadn’t yet found a book that truly transported me, that gave
me that feeling other people spoke of, of forgetting who you are, where
you are, when you are. That feeling of words on paper blurring, replaced
by the story in your mind. It sounded like magic, but it was a magic I
didn’t know.
And then, one day, my mother’s friend called us. She said she was in
a bookstore in Southern California, said there was a lady there signing a
book for kids my age, and should she pick up a copy for me? My mother
waffled, knowing I was drawn more to sports than stories, but in the end,
she said yes. And what arrived in the mail the following week was a
signed copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Needless to say, I
found the magic I was searching for in those pages, and never looked
back. I became a lifelong, avid reader, thanks to my mother’s friend who
happened to be at one of J.K. Rowling’s early signings.
Falling in love with reading really was magic. And because I’m
a Slytherin, I also marveled at the power of it all. If it was magic to read a
story and forget yourself, it was power to write a story and make someone
else forget. From that moment forward, I knew I wanted both—to read
and to write, to experience that magic myself and create it for other
people.

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85. Reading shows you how words and pictures are
different sides of the same thing

by Brian Selznick

Words and pictures have always been connected for me. When I was very
young I had a lisp. Instead of saying “ssss,” I said “thhh,” so my parents
sent me to a speech therapist. The therapist drew a snake in the shape of
an S and I had to fill the snake with S’s. Every time I drew an S, I had to
make an “esss” sound with my tongue in the right place (behind
my teeth)—not an “ethh” sound (with my tongue sticking out between my
teeth). Forever after that I thought of the shape of the letter S, the sound
of the “sss,” and the snake itself as the same thing. For me there was no
difference between the word, the picture, and the sound.
Ssssssnake.
I remember reading many books by Remy Charlip around this time.
He was my favorite author and illustrator. I loved how words and pictures
worked together in his books. In Fortunately, we follow the adventures of
a boy named Ned who is invited to a surprise party. Ned has to travel far and
wide to get there and has many setbacks, including an airplane with an
exploding motor, a cave crawling with tigers, and an ocean filled with
sharks. Every time something good happens to Ned (“Fortunately he
could swim.”) the picture is in color. Every time something bad happens
to Ned (“Unfortunately there was a hole in the parachute.”) the picture is
in black and white. Each turn of the page moves us from something good
to something bad, from a picture in color to a picture in black and white,
from “Fortunately” to “Unfortunately.” The words, the pictures, and the
mood all become one and the same. I thought that was really exciting,
and I think it was Remy Charlip’s work that taught me to really love
books.
Years later, when I was making my book The Invention of Hugo
Cabret, I met Remy Charlip in real life. I was so happy to tell him how

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much his books meant to me when I was a child. During the conversation
I realized he looked very much like one of the main characters in my
story, the filmmaker Georges Méliès, so I asked Remy if he would pose
as the character. He said yes. That means that every time you see one
of my drawings of Georges Méliès, you are really looking at a drawing of
my favorite childhood writer and illustrator, Remy Charlip.

But more than Remy’s face is in my book. The lessons I learned from
him are also there. Remy showed me how words and pictures are differ-
ent sides of the same thing, like the snake I’d drawn as a small child.
Besides being a children’s book writer and illustrator, Remy was also a
teacher. He believed that everyone could make pictures and use language,
even if they don’t think they can write or draw. I agree with him. Think
about it. If you read a book with no pictures, you will create pictures in
your mind of everything you read, even if you never draw them on paper.
(Right now I can write the word elephant and I bet you can see an ele-
phant in your mind!) Also, if you look at pictures in a book and try to
describe them to someone, you will think of words to use pretty easily.
And the exact pictures you imagine, and the specific words you say, will
be different from everyone else’s on earth. In fact, telling stories that
combine words and pictures is what humans have done throughout his-
tory, all the way back to the dawn of time. In the caves of Lascaux, the

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pictures on the walls tell the story of a big hunt. Tens of thousands of
years later, we have emojis on our phones that can also tell stories! These
little images can express moods, ideas, and entire conversations in a sin-
gle picture half the size of your fingernail.
Caves and phones are fine places for stories, but I prefer books, and I
think that’s why my books are filled with images of, and stories about,
other books. The Invention of Hugo Cabret was a celebration of the cin-
ema, but ultimately it was about the power of books. When you finish
reading that book, the object in your hand, the book itself, becomes part
of the story, almost like a magic trick.
That kind of magic, the ability to take ideas and stories and make them
real, to share them with the world, is the gift Scholastic has given all of
us. After I graduated college, I worked as a bookseller at Eeyore’s Books
for Children, in New York City. The most important aspect of my job was
getting the right story into the hands of each person who came into the
store. That’s the same job publishers have, on a global level—creating
and sending out stories so they end up in the right hands. I’ve made a lot
of books with Scholastic. Maybe some of them have ended up in your
hands. One is about a boy who lives behind a clock in a train station,
another is about a Deaf girl who runs away to New York, and a third
features a boy who survives a shipwreck. I even had the chance to draw
another snake when I was asked to illustrate the covers for the twentieth
anniversary of Harry Potter!
Now this book has made its way to your hands. The words and pic-
tures you hold, created by one hundred different authors and illustrators,
make up a larger story, one that I’m proud to be a part of. And even
though you’ll close these covers eventually, the stories in your mind, the
words you think of, and the pictures you imagine, will never stop.

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86. Reading is good news

by David Shannon

Well, maybe it’s old-fashioned, but I love to read newspapers. I love how
they smell, and what they sound like when you turn their pages and
snap them into a nice, flat page to read. Of course, you can roll one up
and whack stuff, too, or you can fold it into a hat. But mostly I like that
they’re full of all kinds of stories. I love to read stories.
I started reading newspapers when I was a kid. The first thing I read
was the sports section, especially the box scores of all the baseball games.
You can tell a lot from a box score if you know how to read them. You can
almost picture the whole game in your head. I always went right to the
Giants game to see if Willie Mays had hit a homer—he was my favorite
player—then I read all the other games.
Later on, after I became an illustrator, I read all about what was going
on in the world because that was my job. Newspaper publishers would
send me a story and I was supposed to paint a picture of what it was
about, with maybe a little twist that would get people interested and help
them understand the subject better. Usually I only had about twenty-four
hours to come up with something, so it was important to already be pretty
familiar with what was happening.
Now I write and illustrate books for kids, but I read newspapers more
than ever! I still like going over all the baseball box scores and keeping
track of who the good guys and the bad guys are in the world and what
they’re up to. But I don’t just read the front page news or the sports
section—I love reading the whole paper all the way through! I like to find
out how much snow fell up at the ski mountain or if my softball game’s
going to get rained out. I like looking at the all the photographs, the funny
cartoons and the cool pictures that other illustrators are doing now. I like
reading about music, and artists’ new paintings, and what books and

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movies are coming out. There are also brand-new discoveries—like a
planet that might have life on it, or a cave with prehistoric remains.
And then there’s all the other stories. People do a lot of crazy things,
and they’re all there in the newspaper. Or maybe it’s something weird
that’s washed up out of the ocean, or a pig that fell in love with a turtle!
Sometimes I get ideas for a book from these stories. Every day, I get to
learn new stuff and I never know what it’s going to be! That’s why I love
reading newspapers.

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by Kevin Sherry

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88. Reading can take you to a place called hope

by Peter Sís

When you are locked in a room, behind the walls of the city and the country.
When you have no place to turn for help—

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Then reading can take you to the place called hope, to imagination,
to humanity and to the future.

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89. Reading gives you invability

by Jordan Sonnenblick

Books have always been like oxygen to me. I can’t imagine life without
them. When I was a kid, the stories in books, and especially in comic
books, often seemed more real to me than the events that were going on
around me in “real” life. This sometimes got me in trouble, like this one
time in third grade when I was at my friend B.J.’s house.

B.J. has been my best friend since preschool. B.J. and I have always
shared books. I discovered comics first, when we were in first grade
and my dad’s barber had Avengers #138 (Stranger in a Strange Man) and
Daredevil #112 (“Murder!” Cries the Mandrill). B.J. got me into DC
comics last year, when he discovered the Legion of Super-Heroes. I lend
him my science fiction novels, and he brings me piles of fantasy books.
We spend hours on top of his bunk bed arguing over who would win in
different battles. Would Shazam beat Thor? What would happen if
Gandalf from Lord of the Rings fought Darth Vader? Could Saturn Girl
from the Legion of Super-Heroes read Professor Xavier’s mind?
These arguments get pretty heated. I once got sent home by B.J.’s
mom after B.J. and I started wrestling to decide whether Superboy was
stronger than Ultra Boy. The issue was very complicated, because we had
a list of each hero’s powers, and we saw that Ultra Boy had invulnerabil-
ity. We didn’t know what that was. We couldn’t even pronounce it. So
when B.J. said Superboy was probably stronger than Ultra Boy, there was
only one way to figure it out. I jumped on him and shouted, “Invability!
I win!” He yelled, “Heat vision! You lose!” I got him in a headlock and
shouted, “Invability beats heat vision!” He rolled over so he was on top of
me and grunted, “Super breath!”
Which has to be Superboy’s dumbest power, by the way.

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This went back and forth for a while, but eventually B.J. pushed me
against the wall with his feet. I grabbed B.J.’s gold necklace, pulled on it,
and screamed, “Invability!” B.J. pushed off from me so he was hanging
halfway off the bed. Then his necklace broke and he fell.
He wasn’t even hurt, but his mom was super mad! She said his neck-
lace, which had the Hebrew symbol chai on it for good luck, was a family
heirloom, whatever that means. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in my
mom’s car on the way home, getting yelled at by her, too.
Apparently, super mad beats invability.
B.J. once told me he is going to be a doctor like his dad, and that one
day he is going to invent a cure for cancer. I know what I want to do with
my life, too. I’m going to write a book someday. I hope kids just like me
will read it and feel like they have invability, too.

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90. Reading is full of small magic

by Maggie Stiefvater

Cats with wings. Paintings that became doors to other worlds. Whispers
in the deadest of night from the deadest of people. Growing up, the books
I pulled off the shelf always had magic in them.
I recall the books of my childhood more strongly than the houses we
lived in. My father was a navy doctor, so when I was a kid, we moved,
and we moved again, and we moved some more. Coast to coast and back
again, and then, even after he got out of the navy, from town to town,
hospital to hospital. We didn’t really have a home; we had houses. Mostly
I remember the libraries—my mother always signed us up for new library
cards, first thing—and I remember the books.
I’d sit in the library stacks for hours, picking out every volume I could
find with a unicorn or UFO sticker on the spine, the universal librarian
method of marking fantasy and science fiction books. Magic, magic, I
always wanted to read about magic.
The best sort of magic, in my opinion, was small magic. Sure, I liked
dramatic fantasy worlds and huge monsters and dueling wizards as much
as anyone, but the stories that stuck with me were ones with a more inti-
mate scope: books about chemistry sets that turned out to be full of
peculiar magic spells, like in The Ogre Downstairs, or cats who were
ordinary, apart from being able to fly, like in Catwings, or girls who lived
lives a lot like mine, but haunted (Wait Till Helen Comes).
Books with big magic were great; they were escape. Literary vaca-
tions. That was good enough in a pinch. But books with small magic,
believable magic, magic that might really happen—well, they changed
the way I looked at the world. They made me look for small magic even
after I closed the pages. They made me look for small magic in the real
world.

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Because of these books, I’d listen for fairy music in the woods behind
our subdivision, conjure thunderstorms with backyard spells, search the
ocean’s coast for water horses, play Scrabble with the ghosts in our attic,
time travel for just a minute or two in the basement of a historic house. I
did this small magic and more, because once I got in the habit of looking
at the world that way, I couldn’t really stop. The truth is, there are all
kinds of tiny, eerie miracles humming through life once you’ve been
taught to look. And that was true for me no matter what zip code I lived
in, no matter which house we were moving to or from.
Where did I grow up? I grew up here: learning that the wind whistling
through the chimney doesn’t have to be just the wind, suspecting that the
creature you saw in the woods behind your school could have been some-
thing more than a deer, and realizing the small, strange girl that was you
might just be a hero waiting to happen.
This is what books did for me: They made small magic my home.

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91. Reading is an adventure!

by Geronimo Stilton and Elisabetta Dami

Dear rodent friends!


Actually, no . . .
Dear rodent reader friends!
Hello, everyone!
Please, let me introduce myself . . . My name is Stilton. Geronimo
Stilton. I’m your faithful mousey friend and editor of the Rodent’s
Gazette, Mouse Island’s most famouse newspaper.
Yes! It really is me! In fur and whiskers!
Chunky cheesy bites, but if today isn’t the day I wanted to tell you
about how much I love reading. Squeak!
And would you like to know who else loves to read? My “mom”! She
helps me write my books about Mouse Island and New Mouse City. If
you don’t know her, I’ll introduce you: My “mom” is Elisabetta Dami,
and she’s been writing children’s books for years.
She always lends a paw (Oops! A hand!) to create our adventures. And
every single one is sweeter than cheesecake and more breathtaking than
blue cheese! They’re also popular all over the world! Did you know
they’ve been translated into forty-nine languages?
Lots of our thrilling stories are inspired by the trips my “mom” and I
take together. You see, we’re very curious about the different cultures
and traditions of the world. The whole world!
And there are lots of laughs in our books, too. That’s because Elisabetta
and I often have a good laugh together, and every time we write a book,
we want to share the positive way we see the world.
Our stories are about values as well—things like integrity, loyalty,
sincerity, honesty, kindness, courage, friendship, respect, love of
nature . . . I’m sure you’ve heard of all of them! They’re a kind of magic

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compass: When things get a bit hairy, they help us decide the right path
to cheese! I am sorry! Choose!
Anyway, one of the most important values for Elisabetta and me is our
love of reading. We think books are mousetastic! That’s because books
are faithful friends.
Books keep us company always and everywhere, and make us feel all
sorts of different things: They can make us laugh out loud, they can touch
our hearts, they can make us dream . . . and all without ever giving us
time to get bored!
Just like good friends, books give us so much without ever asking for
anything in return. They offer us everything, but only when we’re ready
and willing to gobble up all those good things. Every book has an impor-
tant message for us, and it’s up to us to listen!
Books are friends that take us on the biggest adventure there is: the
adventure of reading. Because—word by word, page by page, chapter by
chapter—every book takes us for a ride on the wings of imagination. I
give you my cheesy word on it!
Books, like good friends, also help us get to know the world a bit bet-
ter. And by showing us our own feelings and hopes, they help us get to
know ourselves better, too.
So, let’s meet again soon in a book! We’ll set off together on a new
mousetastic, fur-raising adventure!
Hooray for books! Hooray for reading! Hooray for rodents!
Big, warm, melted cheesy goodbye hugs to everyone! Squeak!

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92. Reading leads you to some real heroes

by R.L. Stine

People ask me what books I read as a kid, and I’m always embarrassed to
answer, “I didn’t read books. I read only comic books.”
My friends and I carried around stacks of comics with us, and we
would swap them and pore over them together, study the art and the
storylines, and spend hours deciding which to add to our collection next.
I had eclectic tastes back then—Dick Tracy, Looney Tunes, Little Lulu,
The Lone Ranger . . .
Then one day, my mother dropped me off at the little library on Main
Street. (I grew up in Bexley, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio.) A librarian
was waiting for me at the door.
She said, “I know you like comic books, Bobby. I have something else
I think you will like.”
She led me to a shelf of Ray Bradbury stories—and changed my life
forever.
I dug into the stories. I couldn’t believe how imaginative they were,
how wonderfully written, how surprising, and most all of them with
tricky twist endings.
Ray Bradbury turned me into a reader. I read as many of his stories as
I could find. Then I moved on to Isaac Asimov, Robert Sheckley, Frederik
Pohl, and Philip K. Dick.
From science fiction, I began to read fantasy novels. And then the
Greek myths, fairy tales, the Norse legends.
I never forgot that librarian and the amazing favor she had done
for me.
Many years later, when I was an author and the Goosebumps series
had become popular all over the world, I had a chance to meet Ray
Bradbury. I spotted him eating a hot dog in a publisher’s booth at the L.A.
Times Book Festival.

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I knew I had to say hello to him. He was so important in my life. But
I was horribly nervous. I walked up to the booth, and I was shaking like
a kid. I stuck my hand out to shake hands with him, and my voice was
high and trembly as I blurted out: “Mr. Bradbury—you’re my hero!”
He turned around, shook hands, and said: “Well, you’re a hero to a lot
of other people!”
What a wonderful thing to say. It was one of the most amazing
moments of my life.
And it never would have happened if that librarian in that tiny library
hadn’t decided to show me some books she thought I might like.

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93. Reading brings you unexpected friendships

by Francisco X. Stork

Over the years, I have been asked by certain books to be their friend. I
don’t know how a book knows that I need a friend at that particular time.
Their offers of friendship arrive in unexpected ways. I’ll be walking aim-
lessly in a bookstore or library when, suddenly, I am drawn mysteriously
to the one who will become my friend. Later, when I start reading, I
understand why a book befriended me just then.
My first friendship with a book happened when I was thirteen. Charlie
Stork, my adoptive father, had recently died in an automobile accident. I
had known Charlie only a brief time. Seven years before, he was travel-
ing through Mexico when he fell in love with my single mother, Ruth
Arguelles. Soon after Charlie and Ruth married, we came to El Paso,
Texas, where there were better economic opportunities for our little
family.
A few months after his death, my mother had to return to Mexico to
care for my grandfather while I stayed with a neighbor. The days were
sad, but the nights were worse. I missed horribly the father and good
friend that Charlie had become.
I don’t remember how the book came into my hands. It was a thick,
old-looking book with a frayed cover. The language was old Spanish and
there were many words I did not understand. I read every night until my
eyes closed, and if I awoke in the middle of the night, the book was there,
within my reach.
There was something about the adventures of the crazy old man who
thought himself a knight that brought me warmth and light. The dia-
logues between the old man and his funny squire made me smile for the
first time in a long time. I felt less alone when I was with them. And when
I closed the book, their courage and liveliness to pursue their quest stayed
with me.

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I am old now, but Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are still friends. I
visit them every couple of years and they remind me again of the light
they brought to me when I was thirteen. Over the years, I have also
become friends with Miguel de Cervantes, their creator. Like all good
friends, we admire our differences and delight in the things we have in
common. I understand the kind of person he is, and when I read his book,
I feel as if he wrote it for that thirteen-year-old boy who needed a friend.

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94. Reading lets you have whatever
power you want

by Tui T. Sutherland

If you had to choose between flying or invisibility, which one would


you pick?
What if you had to choose between telepathy, teleportation, or time
travel?
Or what if you could shape-shift into a dragon . . . or a fox?
What if you didn’t have to choose—because you could have all of the
above?
That’s what I think reading is: the closest we ever get to having super-
powers. When you’re reading, you can be a flying telepathic dragon, a
shape-shifting teenager, or a magical fox. You can teleport to Antarctica
(with The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean) or the fantasy
kingdom of Attolia (in the books by Megan Whalen Turner); you can
time travel to 1970s New York (When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead),
ancient China (Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin), or
a spaceship in the future (Sanity & Tallulah by Molly Brooks and hun-
dreds more!).
We all wonder what other people are thinking, don’t we? I’m endlessly
curious about what’s going on in other people’s heads. Why are they
doing what they’re doing? Do they think like me? Do they worry like me?
Do they want the same things? I feel like, with books, we can actually
find out. We’re inside the author’s brain with her, finding out how
she thinks her characters think. Is there anything closer to telepathy
than that?
If I had to pick one of the powers above, I must admit I’d probably
choose teleportation. I’d never be late again! Plus I could zip to amazing
faraway places whenever I wanted. There are so many places I haven’t
been yet—but I feel like in some ways I have, because of authors like

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Mitali Perkins, Tracey Baptiste, Linda Sue Park, Juana Medina, and
Amy Tan, whose stories take us all around the world.
And isn’t it just like being invisible when you read a scene that you
would never see out in the world? A scene between a family at home, or
teachers in their secret teacher lounge, or a girl writing her first story
alone in her room?
I think reading doesn’t just give you the experience of having super-
powers; it actually grants you the most important superpower of all:
empathy. Once you’ve been the lonely boy whose adopted family treats
him cruelly (the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling), or the kid who
knows she’s something different on the inside than what people see
on the outside (George by Alex Gino), or the girl who’s embarrassed
about the clothes she has to wear because her parents can’t afford any-
thing else (Front Desk by Kelly Yang)—you’ll always have their voices
somewhere inside you. You’ll always be able to imagine yourself in their
place. You’re building the power to understand what another person is
feeling—to look across the room at a person who seems totally different
from you and think, They have a story, too. It’s different from mine, but
it’s just as real as mine.
And hopefully, the more stories you read about kids (or dragons)
changing the world, the more you’ll think, I can do that, too! Because
you can! Even if your actual superpowers are kindness instead of invisi-
bility, empathy instead of flying, and hope instead of teleportation.
So keep reading, take those superpowers, and go save the world! ☺

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95. Reading is whatever you want it to be
by Shaun Tan

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96. Reading is rewarding . . . even
when it’s hard to do

by Lauren Tarshis

My dad was a writer when I was growing up, and every morning I woke
up to the song of his typewriter . . . clickclackclickclackDINGclickclack-
clickclackDING! We didn’t have much money, and my dad seemed to
work way more than my friends’ dads, who put on ties and got on the
train to work in banks and offices in New York City.
But I knew that my dad loved what he did. And when he would travel,
which was often, I would go into his tiny, messy office and stand in front
of his beat-up typewriter and think, I want to be a writer when I grow up.
But then the next thought would be, But that’s impossible. And it was
impossible. Totally impossible, I was sure.
Because I had a secret back then, and the secret was that I couldn’t
read a book. I could read words just fine—sound them out, read them
aloud, no problem. But put all those words on pages with characters and
plots and by around page three all those words would be buzzing around
in my mind like crazy flies, making no sense at all. I didn’t know I had a
reading challenge. I just thought I wasn’t smart. And just like my too-big
feet and my too-frizzy hair, I was sure nothing could be done to stop
those word-flies from buzzing around my brain.
I was too ashamed to tell my parents or my teachers or my friends. So
I kept it from them. Somehow I stumbled along, faking my way through
school, never doing very well.
Meanwhile, my house was filled with books, and my parents loved
to read. My friends were all big readers, especially my best friend,
Michele, who was always talking about her favorite book characters.
Fern from Charlotte’s Web. Kit from The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The way Michele talked
about these characters, they seemed like flesh and blood. It was like

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Michele was always getting invited to parties and hanging out with all
these fascinating people. They made her laugh and think and care and
feel inspired. I wanted to meet them! And I was locked out, cut off.
This went on until I was fourteen, this secret struggle, and that’s a
whole other long story. But finally, my first year of high school, I figured
out how to read a book. The first book I read was A Tale of Two Cities by
Charles Dickens. Somehow I discovered that if I read every paragraph
two or three times, and took notes, I could keep the information straight
in my head. Reading that book was the first time I had the experience of
reading: of entering a new world, traveling through time, connecting to
characters who came to life in my mind and my heart. It was even better
than I’d imagined.
Over the years, I’ve read all the books Michele and my other friends
used to talk about—and many, many more. I’ve met thousands of charac-
ters from different times, places, and worlds. And now I’m writing my
own books, bringing to life characters I can only hope you will talk about
with your friends as though they’re real.
And as I’m writing this now, I can hear the sound of my dad’s beat-up
typewriter in my mind, that clickclackclickclackDINGclickclackclick-
clackDING! echoing from all those years back.
I am remembering how I stood in front of my dad’s typewriter, dream-
ing of being a writer. Knowing it was impossible. Never imagining I
could be wrong.

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97. Reading is something you can pass down

by Sarah Weeks

Reading was always one of my favorite subjects in school, but it never


occurred to me that I might grow up to become an author. When I was
young, I wanted to be a ballerina like the girl in a book I loved called
Ballet Shoes. Or maybe a clever detective like Nancy Drew, following
clues and solving mysteries no one else could figure out. The future was
full of promise and the books I read offered an endless supply of possi-
bilities. Every Saturday my dad would take my sister and me to the Dairy
Queen to get vanilla cones dipped in chocolate, and after we’d finished
our ice cream, we’d head over to the Ann Arbor Public Library to pick
out our books for the week. Everybody in the Weeks family was a reader.
It wasn’t unusual to find us all sitting around the living room with our
noses buried in a good book. My father was an English professor and a
wonderful storyteller, but it was my mother who read to me every night
before I went to sleep. I remember loving picture books like Curious
George and Harry the Dirty Dog and, as I got older, chapter books like
Charlotte’s Web and the Little House series.
Years later, when I had children of my own, I looked forward to read-
ing to my two sons at bedtime the same way my mother had read to me.
Well, not exactly the same way. Sometimes I would change the words to
make them laugh or make up a story of my own to amuse them. When
they outgrew those silly made-up stories and learned to read on their
own, that’s when it dawned on me that maybe I ought to try writing my
stories down so that other people’s children could enjoy them at
bedtime.
That was almost thirty years ago and I’m still making up stories today.
One thing has changed, though—there’s a new book lover in the family.
My son Gabe began reading to his daughter Lulu even before she was
born. I remember he called me one day to say that the baby already had a

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favorite book—one of mine! “How can you tell she likes it?” I asked, and
he explained that whenever he read it to her, she would kick. I hope when
she’s old enough to read some of the books her gigi wrote, she’ll feel the
same way about Glamourpuss and Pie and Save Me a Seat and Soof.
Lulu’s parents read to her every night before they put her down to sleep
the same way I read to my children and my mother read to me. Someday
when Lulu has children of her own, I have a feeling she’ll read to them
too. Life is good and reading makes it even better.

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98. Reading is a radiant web of words

by Scott Westerfeld

The same story that made me a reader also made me a writer. The two
roles, after all, are part of the same web.
Charlotte’s, to be specific.
The story of Wilbur and his spider protector is about friendship,
of course. It’s also about how children process their growing realizations of
injustice, of loss and impermanence, and of death. But for me, Charlotte’s
Web was always about the power of the word.
Wilbur becomes a famous pig not through his great deeds or dazzling
talents, but thanks to words. The adjectives that Charlotte weaves above
his pen—terrific and radiant—are the sort that roll luxuriously off a
kid’s tongue when first learned. There’s a relish to uttering our early
“big” words. My niece, now seven, refers to everything even mildly
interesting as magnificent.
As a child, I was also a relentless repeater of new words. My sisters
rolled their eyes at how my latest pet adjective wormed its way into every
sentence I spoke. It was probably solid teaching, repeating new acquisi-
tions, but I had no conscious desire to increase my vocabulary. My
repetition sprang from a sense that words are spells. They have power on
the tongue; they are music in the air.
One of the tempting promises of reading was that more new words
would be coming my way, ready to be deployed in daily life. And that
they would bring me power.
Charlotte weaves compliments into her webs, but she isn’t simply out
to flatter Wilbur. She’s out to rescue him from a death as inevitable as the
seasons. That we can save someone with the right words at the right
time—“I love you,” “You are valuable,” “Don’t touch that wire!”—is the
height of word magic.

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Whenever we lose someone in the worst way possible, the question
lingers in the air: “What could I have said?”
As I got older, the truth of Charlotte’s story grew more complicated.
Especially when I learned that words not only told stories, but possessed
their own—the word text descends from the Latin texere, “to weave,”
and the great weaver in Greek myth was Arachne, who was transformed
into the mother of all spiders for daring to out-weave the gods. Her name
went down the same path, becoming the root of the word spider in
Romance languages, and the scientific name of the order that includes
them. The oldest stories are always right here, woven into our words.
We spin tales, we argue in threads, and good stories are yarns—all of
it goes back to weaving. There’s a godlike power in capturing a reader in
a web of words, a divine pleasure in being captured.
But I was still surprised when I read Charlotte’s Web to my niece last
year, and encountered its last lines: “It is not often that someone comes
along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
Like a magic trick, the card I thought I’d chosen for myself was right
there all along.

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99. Reading gives you answers to questions you
don’t even know to ask

by Deborah Wiles

When I was a kid, my favorite room in our house was my father’s study,
with its bookcases across one wall that were filled with . . . knowledge. I
was a nerdy kid who wanted to understand the world (I already loved it),
and I learned early on that answers to the questions I didn’t even know to
ask were found in books.
So I pulled them off the shelf, one by one, and then, sprawled across
the checkered rug in my father’s study, year after year, I was educated.
My favorite series to scour was called The Book of Knowledge: The
Children’s Encyclopedia. I opened it at random and read about how the
atomic bomb was made (which I am sure I remembered many years later
when I wrote Countdown), or how cotton was ginned and manufactured
(which I remembered as I wrote Revolution), or how to hike the Alcan
Highway in Alaska (which I have not written about . . . yet).
My favorite book in my father’s study was the Reader’s Digest
Treasury for Young Readers. I read that book cover to cover, many times.
I read about how to make musical instruments “from odds and ends,”
how to identify birds, how television works, and—my favorite—“John
Glenn’s Day in Space.” Which again led to Countdown, decades later. I
think the mind stores away what it learns, against the day it might need
that memory or that knowledge; at least I think that’s what happened with
some of what I learned in all those years of education. Who knew I would
write about atomic bombs or cotton picking or the American space race?
All I knew was that there was an immense pleasure to be had in reading
and learning, and I was like a sponge, wanting to know everything there
was to know about the world and who lived in it.
And I knew that I liked best books that had lots of ways to tell the
stories within them, books full of pieces and parts, odds and ends of

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connective tissue that made up the whole. A puzzle here, a map there,
some poetry, some directions.
So it felt natural to me, when I became a writer, to write stories that
contained lots of connective tissue . . . like the letters, recipes, gossip col-
umns, and obituaries that help tell Ruby’s story in Love, Ruby Lavender,
Comfort’s story in Each Little Bird That Sings, and Emma Lane Cake’s
story in A Long Line of Cakes.
Like the scrapbooks full of photographs, song lyrics, newspaper clip-
pings, quotes, and other primary source material I included in the Sixties
Trilogy: Countdown, Revolution, and Anthem.
It would take many years of reading both fiction and nonfiction, and
falling in love with characters in novels that I clung to like breath, before
I began to understand how to write my own stories by combining my
personal history with the history of the world. I’m convinced I write
using this structure of bits and pieces and odds and ends that all fit
together—because it was how I loved to read as a child.
I discovered those books I loved, and a direction for the writing years
ahead, because—I now see—my father loved the world in the same way
I did; because he wanted, just as I did, to understand the world; and
because he gathered so many books close to him, so he could read to his
heart’s content, and learn. Just as I did, after him.
Thank you, Dad.

210

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100. Reading is incarnational

Three poems by Jane Yolen

How to Get into a Book

Some people stride in at a galloping clip,


Some at a comfortable lope.
Some test the waters with hesitant toe,
Some slide down a book’s slanting slope.

Some hop right in with a mile of a smile,


Some crawl so reluctant and slow.
Some fling themselves right into towering waves
And get caught in the strong undertow.

But me, I fall down the deep hole of a book,


Where I spend a long, comfortable time.
I don’t care if the book is a memoir or novel
Or made up of rhythm and rhyme.

It’s the bookness I crave, all the new worlds I find,


When I travel afar in the hold of my mind.

211

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This Is Not a Book

This is not a book but a world,


trees like fists, thrust upward, bold.
Rivers snaking through the tall grass,
startled, winding, glassy, cold.

This is not a book but a city


a skyscraper of seems,
pothole of fears, cracked pavement
of promises, fueled by dreams.

This is not a book but a life,


throbbing with story,
an arc of decisions, a thwarting
of interests, climax of glory.

This is not a book, but my art,


my desires, my craft, my decisions, my heart.
This is not a book.

212

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Incarnation

“Writing is incarnational”
—Flannery O’Connor

Reading is incarnational, too.


I began this day as a Jane,
made my way through Dorothy,
finished as a flying monkey,
shook the alternate dust
of Oz from my shoes.
Tomorrow I plan to go sailing
with Billy Budd; hope that ends
rather better than the last time
we took to sea.

This incarnational thing


is hard on relationships,
finishing as they do
with the slap of a cover.
I get to go back to my own life,
and they get to stay inside theirs
till some godlight shines again
on their opening pages.
Which one of us will last?

That’s the question.

213

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7p_100ReasonsToLoveReading.indd 214 28/04/2020 13:45
Reading helps you grow!
by Raina Telgemeier

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7p_100ReasonsToLoveReading.indd 216 28/04/2020 13:46
About the Scholastic Authors
Collectively, the authors below have written well over a thousand books,
many of them for Scholastic. Among the titles listed, there are award
winners, bestsellers, and many books that have become classics since
they were first published. Because we only have enough space for a line
or two for each author, the following is an incomplete list highlighting
up to three of each author’s Scholastic titles. Readers are encouraged to
check out scholastic.com and the authors’ individual websites to learn
more about each author.

K.A. Applegate is the author of such generation-defining series as


Animorphs, EverWorld, and Remnants.

Avi’s many acclaimed novels include The True Confessions of Charlotte


Doyle, Nothing but the Truth, and Midnight Magic.

David Baldacci is the author of the Vega Jane series that began with The
Finisher and concluded with The Stars Below.

Blue Balliett’s first novel was Chasing Vermeer, beginning a series that
continued with books including The Wright 3. Her most recent book was
the ghost story Out of the Wild Night.

Jim Benton started at Scholastic with the It’s Happy Bunny and Dear
Dumb Diary series. His current Graphix series is Catwad.

Judy Blundell is the author of What I Saw and How I Lied and, as Jude
Watson, novels including Loot and many books in the 39 Clues series.

Coe Booth is the author of books for younger readers including Kinda
Like Brothers, and YA novels including Tyrell and Kendra.

Ann E. Burg debuted with All the Broken Pieces. Her other novels
include Serafina’s Promise and Flooded.

Kacen Callender is the author of Hurricane Child and King of the


Dragonflies.

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Sharon Cameron’s YA novels include The Dark Unwinding, Rook, and
The Light in Hidden Places.

Angela Cervantes is the author of novels including Gaby, Lost


and Found; Me, Frida, and the Secret of the Peacock Ring; and Lety Out
Loud.

Lucy Christopher made her mark with her first YA novel, Stolen, and
has since written novels including Flyaway (for younger readers) and
Storm-Wake.

Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen are the team behind the Magic School
Bus series, which launched in 1986 and published a new book, The Magic
School Bus Explores Human Evolution, thirty-four years later in 2020.

Suzanne Collins is the author of the picture book Year of the Jungle,
the middle-grade series The Underland Chronicles, and the YA series The
Hunger Games.

Bruce Coville has been engaging young readers’ imaginations for many
decades with books including his Unicorn Chronicles series, and his Book
of Nightmares and Book of Monsters.

Christopher Paul Curtis’s novels for Scholastic include Elijah of


Buxton, The Madman of Piney Woods, and The Journey of Little Charlie.

Edwidge Danticat’s writing for children ranges from the picture book
Eight Days to the Royal Diaries title Anacaona, Golden Flower to the YA
novel Untwine.

Sayantani DasGupta launched her Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond


series with The Serpent’s Secret and continued with Game of Stars and
The Chaos Curse.

Lulu Delacre’s storytelling includes the picture books Arroz Con Leche
and Vejigante Masquerader and the collection Salsa Stories.

Chris D’Lacey’s fantastical series for young readers include The Last
Dragon Chronicles and The Erth Dragons.

7p_100ReasonsToLoveReading.indd 218 28/04/2020 13:46


Jennifer Donnelly has spun many tales for young adults, including
Stepsister and Poisoned.

Jenny Downham is the author of the YA novels Unbecoming and


Furious Thing.

Julie Falatko is the author of the series Two Dogs in a Trench Coat,
including such titles as Two Dogs in a Trench Coat Go to School and Two
Dogs in a Trench Coat Start a Club by Accident.

Sharon G. Flake’s many acclaimed novels include Pinned and


Unstoppable Octobia May.

Aimee Friedman is the author of many YA novels, including Sea


Change, French Kiss, and Two Summers.

Cornelia Funke has taken readers to many worlds in her novels,


including The Thief Lord, Inkheart, and Dragon Rider.

Eric Gansworth is a poet and scholar, as well as the author of the YA


novels If I Ever Get Out of Here and Give Me Some Truth.

Lamar Giles is the author of the mysteries Overturned and Spin, among
other novels.

Alex Gino started their career with the novel George, and continued with
You Don’t Know Everything, Jilly P! and Rick.

Christina Diaz Gonzalez’s writing for young readers includes the


novels Moving Target and Return Fire and a forthcoming graphic novel.

Alan Gratz’s works of historical fiction include Prisoner B-3087, Refugee,


and Allies.

Melissa Grey is the author of many YA novels, including Rated.

Virginia Hamilton was one of the twentieth century’s most highly regarded
writers for children. Her writing for Scholastic includes Her Stories: African
American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales and The People Could Fly:
American Black Folktales, as well as many novels and picture books.

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Karen Hesse is the author of such beloved novels as Out of the Dust,
Witness, and The Music of Dolphins.

Tanuja Desai Hidier is the author of the groundbreaking novel Born


Confused and its sequel, Bombay Blues.

Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm are the brother-sister team


behind the Sunny series, which Jennifer writes and Matt illustrates. The
titles include Sunny Side Up, Sunny Rolls the Dice, and Swing It, Sunny.

Deborah Hopkinson’s works of nonfiction include D-Day: The World


War II Invasion That Changed History; Titanic: Voices from the Disaster;
and Shutting Out the Sky: Life in the Tenements of New York, 1880–1924.

Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of the YA novels The Summer


Prince and Love Is the Drug.

Varian Johnson’s books for young readers include The Parker


Inheritance and The Great Greene Heist.

Jess Keating has written for readers of all ages, including the series
Elements of Genius and Bunbun & Bonbon, and the picture book Eat
Your Rocks, Croc!

Christine Kendall’s debut novel was Riding Chance and her latest is
The True Definition of Neva Beane.

Kody Keplinger’s books include the middle-grade novel Lila and


Hadley and the YA novels That’s Not What Happened and Run.

Barbara Kerley is the author of such nonfiction picture books as The


Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins and Eleanor Makes Her Mark as well
as the novel Greetings from Planet Earth.

Sabina Khan is the author of The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali and the
forthcoming Zara Hossain Is Here.

Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet series was one of the first in the Graphix imprint
and has continued most recently with its eighth installment, Supernova.
He also wrote the picture book Copper.

7p_100ReasonsToLoveReading.indd 220 28/04/2020 13:46


Amy Sarig King is the author of Me and Marvin Gardens and The Year
We Fell from Space. She also writes YA novels as A. S. King.

Bill Konigsberg’s YA novels include Openly Straight, The Music of


What Happens, and The Bridge.

Gordon Korman published his first novel, This Can’t Be Happening


at Macdonald Hall!, with Scholastic when he was fourteen years old.
Over four decades later, he is still publishing at Scholastic, with novels
including Restart and War Stories.

Jarrett J. Krosoczka’s work ranges from picture books to books in the


Jedi Academy series to the YA graphic memoir Hey, Kiddo.

Kirby Larson is the author of the Dogs of World War II series, including
Duke and Code Word Courage, and the Audacity Jones series.

Kathryn Lasky’s series include Guardians of Ga’Hoole, Wolves of the


Beyond, and Bears of the Ice.

Peter Lerangis wrote a number of books in the 39 Clues series and the
novel Smiler’s Bones, among many other works for young readers.

David Levithan has edited four anthologies of the best young writers and
artists in America, drawn from winners of the Scholastic Art & Writing
Awards, as well as co-edited the YA anthology 21 Proms. He has worked at
Scholastic since he was nineteen.

Sarah Darer Littman is the author of many realistic novels for teens,
including Want to Go Private?, Backlash, and Deepfake.

Natalie Lloyd’s enchanting novels for young readers include A Snicker


of Magic, The Key to Extraordinary, and Over the Moon.

Tracy Mack is the co-author of the Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street
Irregulars series, as well as author of the novels Drawing Lessons and
Birdland.

Carolyn Mackler has written the middle-grade novels Not If I Can Help
It and Best Friend Next Door, as well as numerous YA novels.

7p_100ReasonsToLoveReading.indd 221 28/04/2020 13:46


Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-sitters Club launched in 1986 and currently
has over 180 million copies in print. Her acclaimed novels include A
Corner of the Universe and A Dog’s Life.

Wendy Mass is the author of the Willow Falls series, which started with
11 Birthdays, and the Twice Upon a Time series, as well as other novels
for young readers.

Patricia C. McKissack was, along with her husband, Fred McKissack,


one of the most honored writers of fiction and nonfiction for young
readers, for books such as Black Hands, White Sails; Christmas in the Big
House, Christmas in the Quarters; and Days of Jubilee.

Kate Messner’s writing for young people includes the Ranger in Time
series and the novels Capture the Flag and Manhunt.

Ellen Miles is the author of the Puppy Place series, among other series
for kids.

Sarah Mlynowski made her mark with the Whatever After series, and is
also one of the three writers of the Upside-Down Magic series.

Jaclyn Moriarty has drawn a passionate following of readers for middle-


grade fantasies like The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte
Mettlestone and YA novels including The Year of Secret Assignments.

Robert Munsch is one of Canada’s most beloved storytellers, for books


including Love You Forever and Andrew’s Loose Tooth.

Jon J Muth is the visionary creator of such picture books as The Three
Questions and Zen Shorts and the graphic novel The Seventh Voyage.

Walter Dean Myers was one of the towering figures in children’s


and young adult literature. He wrote over a hundred books in his career,
including Fallen Angels, Slam!, and The Glory Field.

Jennifer A. Nielsen is the author of The False Prince, A Night Divided,


and Words on Fire, among many other novels.

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Garth Nix is one of the foremost writers of fantasy for young readers
and young adults. His series include The Keys to the Kingdom and The
Seventh Tower, and his novels include Frogkisser!

Michael Northrop’s works for young readers include the novels


Trapped and On Thin Ice, and the series TombQuest.

Daniel José Older is the author of the Dactyl Hill Squad series, the
Shadowshaper series, and novels including the forthcoming Flood City.

Molly Knox Ostertag is the author and illustrator of the acclaimed


Graphix series The Witch Boy, which includes The Witch Boy, The Hidden
Witch, and The Midwinter Witch.

Micol Ostow has written books in the Riverdale and Mean Girls
universes, as well as YA novels including Popular Vote.

Rodman Philbrick’s first novel for Scholastic, Freak the Mighty, was
published in 1998. Since then he has written many acclaimed novels,
including The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg and Wildfire.

Dav Pilkey has reached tens of millions of kids through his series,
including Captain Underpants and Dog Man, as well as picture books
including The Paperboy and Dog Breath.

Andrea Davis Pinkney is the author of such monumental works as


Marvin Rising: Requiem for a King and With the Might of Angels.

Sharon Robinson’s many works for Scholastic include the nonfiction


book Promises to Keep: How Jackie Robinson Changed America,
the novel The Hero Two Doors Down, and the memoir Child of the
Dream.

Madelyn Rosenberg is the author, with Wendy Wan-Long Shang, of


This Is Just a Test and Not Your All-American Girl.

J.K. Rowling first published with Scholastic in 1998 with Harry Potter
and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

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Pam Muñoz Ryan’s novel Esperanza Rising is celebrating its twentieth
anniversary in 2020. She is also the author of such acclaimed novels as
Echo and Mañanaland.

Aida Salazar launched her career as a novelist for young people with
The Moon Within. Her second novel, The Land of the Cranes, is being
published in 2020.

Lisa Ann Sandell’s fiction for young adults includes Song of the Sparrow
and A Map of the Known World.

Allen Say’s remarkable career as a writer and illustrator includes the


memoirs Drawing from Memory and Silent Days, Silent Dreams and
numerous picture books, most recently Almond.

Augusta Scattergood is author of Glory Be, The Way to Stay in


Destiny, and Making Friends with Billy Wong.

Eliot Schrefer is the author of The Ape Quartet, which began with
Endangered and Threatened, as well as books in the Spirit Animals series.

Victoria Schwab writes novels for all ages. Her middle-grade novels
include City of Ghosts, Tunnel of Bones, and Everyday Angel.

Brian Selznick wrote and illustrated such genre-defining books as The


Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck, and illustrated such picture
books as When Marian Sang.

Wendy Wan-Long Shang is the author, with Madelyn Rosenberg,


of This Is Just a Test and Not Your All-American Girl. Her solo novels
include The Great Wall of Lucy Wu.

David Shannon keeps getting kids to say yes to his books, including No,
David!; A Bad Case of Stripes; and Duck on a Bike.

Kevin Sherry is the author and illustrator of such series as The Yeti Files,
Remy Sneakers, and Squidding Around.

Peter Sís’s illustrated work includes the picture book Robinson and the
art for Pam Muñoz Ryan’s novel The Dreamer.

7p_100ReasonsToLoveReading.indd 224 28/04/2020 13:46


Jordan Sonnenblick made a generation laugh and cry with his debut,
Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie. He has since written many novels, including
Falling Over Sideways and The Secret Sheriff of Sixth Grade. His memoir
of his own fifth-grade year will be published in 2021.

Maggie Stiefvater’s spellbinding YA novels include those in the Shiver


and Raven Boys series, as well as The Scorpio Races and All the Crooked
Saints.

Geronimo Stilton and Elisabetta Dami were first published by


Scholastic in 2004 with Lost Treasure of the Emerald Eye. Over a hundred
books in numerous series have followed.

R.L. Stine’s hallmark horror series Goosebumps launched in 1992 with


Welcome to Dead House. It is still going strong, most recently with the
Goosebumps Slappyworld series, almost thirty years later.

Francisco X. Stork is the author of many praised works of YA fiction,


including Marcelo in the Real World, Disappeared, and Illegal.

Tui T. Sutherland rode a dragon onto the scene with The Dragonet
Prophecy, the first book in her epic Wings of Fire series. A Graphix
version of Wings of Fire has also been wildly popular.

Shaun Tan’s unique works defy categorization, as they compel readers


young and old. His illustrated books include The Arrival, Tales from Outer
Suburbia, and Cicada.

Lauren Tarshis has brought history to life for millions of young readers
with her I Survived series.

Raina Telgemeier is the trailblazing author and illustrator of graphic


memoirs such as Smile and Guts, and graphic novels including Drama.

Sarah Weeks is the author of a number of acclaimed middle-grade


novels including Pie, Honey, and Soof.

Scott Westerfeld is one of the biggest names in speculative fiction for


children and young adults. His series include Impostors and Horizon.

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Deborah Wiles invented the genre of the documentary novel with her
Sixties Trilogy. She is also known for the Aurora County novels, including
A Long Line of Cakes, and her first work for young adults, Kent State.

Jane Yolen has shown one of the widest ranges, and has had one of the
widest reaches, of anyone who’s written for children in the past hundred
years. She has written everything from picture books (including the How
Do Dinosaurs series) to fantasy novels to young adult books, in both
poetry and prose.

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Copyright Information
Reading gives you the power to understand Copyright © 2020 by K.A. Applegate
Reading shows you how to be gone Copyright © 2020 by Avi
Reading opens your mind Copyright © 2020 by David Baldacci
Reading is a purple crayon Copyright © 2020 by Blue Balliett
Reading is half the fun Copyright © 2020 by Jim Benton
Reading makes you an interesting person on an interesting journey Copyright © 2020 by Judy Blundell
Reading works whenever you get to it Copyright © 2020 by Coe Booth
Reading brings sage advice Copyright © 2020 by Ann E. Burg
Reading can introduce you to the people you need in your life Copyright © 2020 by Kacen Callender
Reading is the magic found Copyright © 2020 by Sharon Cameron
Reading is good trouble Copyright © 2020 by Angela Cervantes
Reading conjures new landscapes Copyright © 2020 by Lucy Christopher
Reading is your own magic ride Copyright © 2020 by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen
Reading taps into knowledge Copyright © 2020 by Suzanne Collins
Reading is a shared journey Copyright © 2020 by Bruce Coville
Reading enables you to learn from a world of authors Copyright © 2020 by Christopher Paul Curtis
Reading comforts and heals Copyright © 2020 by Edwidge Danticat
Reading is good medicine Copyright © 2020 by Sayantani DasGupta
Reading lets you know that you, too, have a story to tell Copyright © 2020 by Lulu Delacre
Reading leads to a world of infinite adventures Copyright © 2020 by Chris D’Lacey
Reading shows you the woods and helps you through Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Donnelly
Reading lets you go to places and see things you never would or could Copyright © 2020 by Jenny Downham
Reading is a beautiful, scientific mystery Copyright © 2020 by Julie Falatko
Reading is a tool of freedom Copyright © 2020 by Sharon G. Flake
Reading gets you into the club Copyright © 2020 by Aimee Friedman
Reading is chocolate Copyright © 2020 by Cornelia Funke
Reading gives you unexpected new friends Copyright © 2020 by Eric Gansworth
Reading works on your mind Copyright © 2020 by Lamar Giles
Reading can give you words to help you know and name yourself Copyright © 2020 by Alex Gino
Reading builds bridges Copyright © 2020 by Christina Diaz Gonzalez
Reading takes you and your fears seriously Copyright © 2020 by Alan Gratz
Reading gives you an escape . . . and a home Copyright © 2020 by Melissa Grey
Reading is of enormous importance Copyright © 2020 by The Arnold Adoff Revocable Living Trust. Used By Permission.
Reading will keep you company Copyright © 2020 by Karen Hesse
Reading gives you unexpected role models Copyright © 2020 by Tanuja Desai Hidier
Reading brings families together Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm
Reading helps us realize that everyone’s story matters Copyright © 2020 by Deborah Hopkinson
Reading introduces you to lifelong friends Copyright © 2020 by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Reading can give you the past, present, and future Copyright © 2020 by Varian Johnson
Reading changes gravity Copyright © 2020 by Jess Keating
Reading is like dancing with words Copyright © 2020 by Christine Kendall
Reading is something that can be shared out loud Copyright © 2020 by Kody Keplinger
Reading makes you the best kind of snoop Copyright © 2020 by Barbara Kerley
Reading provides a lifeline when everything is different Copyright © 2020 by Sabina Khan
Reading connects us to the world Copyright © 2020 by Kazu Kibuishi
Reading helps people feel Copyright © 2020 by Amy Sarig King
Reading lets you know you’re not the only one Copyright © 2020 by Bill Konigsberg
Reading gets you through the storm Copyright © 2020 by Gordon Korman
Reading gets you excited to create Copyright © 2020 by Jarrett J. Krosoczka
Reading introduces you to the inspiring people Copyright © 2020 by Kirby Larson
Reading makes you who you are Copyright © 2020 by Kathryn Lasky
Reading makes us all detectives Copyright © 2020 by Peter Lerangis
Reading is for curious cats Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Darer Littman
Reading gives us courage Copyright © 2020 by Natalie Lloyd
Reading makes you feel seen (without having to explain yourself) Copyright © 2020 by Tracy Mack
Reading makes you less alone Copyright © 2020 by Carolyn Mackler
Reading can satisfy our curiosity . . . or fire it up Copyright © 2020 by Ann M. Martin
Reading transports you Copyright © 2020 by Wendy Mass
Reading is like breathing Copyright © 2020 by the McKissack Literary Trust
Reading brings you sharks, snakes, and . . . Ramona Copyright © 2020 by Kate Messner
Reading gives you comfort Copyright © 2020 by Ellen Miles
Reading can be a shared experience Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Mlynowski
Reading is a story in itself Copyright © 2020 by Jaclyn Moriarty
Reading, like a dog, can bring you great joy Copyright © 2020 by Robert Munsch
Reading is an act of faith Copyright © 2020 by Jon J Muth
Reading thrills with the wonder of language Reprinted by permission of DeFiore and Company Literary Management,
Inc. on behalf of Constance Myers. Copyright © 2009 by Walter Dean Myers

7p_100ReasonsToLoveReading.indd 229 28/04/2020 13:46


Reading is for rebels Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer A. Nielsen
Reading is a magic portal Copyright © 2020 by Garth Nix
Reading may be hard, but it’s worth the trip Copyright © 2020 by Michael Northrop
Reading takes you deeply into its world Copyright © 2020 by Daniel José Older
Reading is an invitation Copyright © 2020 by Molly Knox Ostertag
Reading can lead you to your dream job Copyright © 2020 by Micol Ostow
Reading is a special superpower Copyright © 2020 by Rodman Philbrick
Reading is all about love Copyright © 2020 by Dav Pilkey
Reading is a bouquet on paper Copyright © 2020 by Andrea Davis Pinkney
Reading puts a light in your eyes Copyright © 2020 by Sharon Robinson
Reading leads to fantastic collaborations Copyright © 2020 by Madelyn Rosenberg
and Wendy Wan-Long Shang
Opening Thought Copyright © 2020 by J. K. Rowling; Text from Harry Potter
and the Order of the Phoenix Copyright © 2003 by J. K. Rowling
Reading is a rope in a deep well Copyright © 2020 by Pam Muñoz Ryan
Reading gives breath to a new whisper Copyright © 2020 by Aida Salazar
Reading can take you to so many different times and places Copyright © 2020 by Lisa Ann Sandell
Reading is human Copyright © 2020 by Allen Say
Reading can turn a classroom into a magic carpet Copyright © 2020 by Augusta Scattergood
Reading can help you survive Copyright © 2020 by Eliot Schrefer
Reading is a magic you can experience and create Copyright © 2020 by Victoria Schwab
Reading shows you how words and pictures are different sides of the same thing
Copyright © 2020 by Brian Selznick; Art from The Invention of Hugo Cabret Copyright © 2007 by Brian Selznick
Reading is good news Copyright © 2020 by by David Shannon
Reading is cosmic Copyright © 2020 by Kevin Sherry
Reading can take you to a place called hope Copyright © 2020 by Peter Sís
Reading gives you invability Copyright © 2020 by Jordan Sonnenblick
Reading is full of small magic Copyright © 2020 by Maggie Stiefvater
Reading is an adventure! Copyright © 2020 by Edizioni Piemme S.p.A.
Reading leads you to some real heroes Copyright © 2020 by R.L. Stine
Reading brings you unexpected friendships Copyright © 2020 by Francisco X. Stork
Reading lets you have whatever power you want Copyright © 2020 by Tui T. Sutherland
Reading is whatever you want it to be Copyright © 2020 by Shaun Tan
Reading is rewarding . . . even when it’s hard to do Copyright © 2020 by Lauren Tarshis
Reading helps you grow! Copyright © 2020 by Raina Telgemeier
Reading is something you can pass down Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Weeks
Reading is a radiant web of words Copyright © 2020 by Scott Westerfeld
Reading gives you answers to questions you don’t even know to ask Copyright © 2020 by Deborah Wiles
Reading is incarnational Copyright © 2020 by Jane Yolen

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