2 of 22

Write now Article Tools

Reading the World

Reading must've come easily for me because I don't remember struggling to do it. Yet I do remember in first grade using word flashcards that were attached to metal rings like keys on a key chain. In my mother's photo album is a picture of four-year-old me, pretending I could write by scribbling on scrap paper my father would bring home from the high school where he taught social studies.

Luckily for me, my mother saved my favorite childhood picture book, Josephine van Dolzen Pease's This Is the World, about children who live in different countries. What I remembered most (we're talking about some thirty years now) was a black-and-white illustration of children standing around a globe. Holding hands, they are arranged like daisy petals.

When I look at the book now, I notice that it was published in 1944. While World War II raged, Pease created a work about the similarities of all human beings, Allies and Axis alike. She dedicated it to "all the children everywhere" and prefaced it with a quotation:

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,
No higher than the soul is high.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay

When I reflect upon what kind of person I became as I matured, I can see themes in This Is the World that compelled me: tolerance and an interest in people and languages of other countries. I have studied French and lived in France, I have hosted international students, I have taught English as a second language. I believe in the value of diversity in race, gender, and creed.

To think that my favorite childhood book would one day say so much about me boggles my mind. I wonder what the books my three children have chosen as their favorites will say about them someday.

By the time I was in second grade, we'd moved from a small town to a larger town-one that had a public library. Joy! I remember how proud I was to get my own library card. My mother took me and my sisters there once a week. This library was a historic brown-brick building, and its window seat with padded cushions was my favorite place to sit and read. Not surprising then, The Velvet Room, in which a girl sneaks into an abandoned Victorian house to sit and read at the window seat of a velvet-draped room, became my favorite children's novel.

I remember deciding to read all of the fiction titles in the children's room. (I didn't get further than the Cs.) I did better at the Indian Hills Elementary library, where I read all of the juvenile biographies! During the winter months, I avoided going out at recess by helping the librarian. By fourth grade, I'd decided to become a writer, but that's another story.

Learn more about this author, Jeanne Lesinski.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

Add your voice

Know something about On rereading the books of your childhood?
We want to hear your view. Write now!