Oh the places you'll go!

Looking back on my childhood, some of my favorite memories are the books i read.

I was a religious reader from the get go.
I can remember going to our library and pouring over the childrens section with great determination to choose only the best books since they had a limit on how many you could check out at one time.
Amelia Bedilia was my favorite book series for a while. Amelia was a maid for a very rich woman but Amelia's problem was that she took everything literally. When her boss said "strip the bed" then Amelia would take scissors and cut the bedsheets into strips, when she was told to make "string beans" she got some string and hung beans from one corner of the kitchen to the other. Or when her boss wanted to throw a baby shower...you guessed it, all of the guests left wet.
It was such a great series because it allowed children to laugh at something adults would laugh at, and that made me feel big.
Another favorite series that i can remember going and picking out with my Dad especially, was Frog and Toad. While no particular plot line sticks out in my head, the pictures are still there and i can revisit the visual of their tales any time i want.

My fifth grade teacher had a big hand in deepening my appetite for books. After our lunch time everyday we would turn off all the lights, put our heads on our desks and listen intently as she would read us a book. One book, whose name escapes me, was about a missionary that smuggled Bibles into a foreign country. It had red tipped pages and i can recall scenes of the main character walking down the street, or driving past border patrolls with hundreds of Bibles going unseen.
But the greatest book she ever read us, the best by far that was just as much my favorite book then as it is now was "From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankwhiler" (this book was mentioned by jim on a special "webisode" of the office entitled "take your daughter to work day")
It's the kind of story you read and re-read because you wanted to live it so badly. It's about two kids who decide to run away to the museum in New York. They plan it out carefully and stay very comfortably in the bed of a famous historical figure. The whole book is just amazing and i've re-read it every year since fifth grade.

I love the fact that i read because when i look back on my childhood and think of everything i got to experience, those memories include running away to a famous museum, smuggling Bibles across borders, solving cases with the hardy boys, or getting into scrapes with little Ramona. I have an abundance of characters and scenes in my head that would have never been there had i not been afforded the pleasure of books.

It saddens me when children don't tap into that world that's waiting for them in their own imagination, which is why i want to write childrens books.
I want that chance to speak to children in a way no one else can, through characters and plots and adventures, to take them places they may never physically go but will look back on with detailed memory as if they had.

To have the opportunity to be a part of so many people's childhood would be a such an honor.