This was to say nothing of the YA titles I encountered, which presented visions of the world so unlike my own, I might as well have been reading science fiction.Īs a kid, books had alleviated my loneliness. To be sure, I enjoyed a few adult books in these years - The Lovely Bones, I Know This Much Is True - but getting through them involved more effort than reading had ever required. If such a novel existed, I couldn’t find it.
Piggle-Wiggle: a novel that was entertaining, well made, and vaguely relevant to my life experience as a quiet, nervous high schooler who hadn’t yet figured out he was gay. I wanted the 14-year-old equivalent of Mrs. But the books themselves had something to do with my changing reading habits, too. Partly this was a function of age - now that I was older, I was eager to try on different identities: the theater kid, the flute player. I still loved the Harry Potter books, but few other novels held my attention with the same intensity. I never noticed the page numbers.Īll that changed when I became a teenager. In those days, reading was something I did automatically, with unthinking pleasure. (“I am not telling anyone who is going to die,” she insisted, “but I would like to reassure you that I, too, am exceptionally fond of Hermione.”) Following the publication of the third Harry Potter novel, I wrote Rowling a fan letter she responded by personally addressing my concerns about the fates of certain characters. As I got older, I graduated to authors like Lois Lowry and Sharon Creech, though my favorite writer (naturally) was J. Frank Baum, and Laura Ingalls Wilder were, for me, like air, water, and shelter: necessary for basic functioning. WHEN I WAS A KID, I read books like my life depended on it.
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