Susan B. Neuman is a professor and chair of teaching and learning at New York University. Previously, she served as a professor at the University of Michigan and the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education. Neuman has served on the IRA Board of Directors and other boards of nonprofit organizations, and she is currently the editor of Reading Research Quarterly. She has written over 100 articles and authored and edited 11 books. Her most recent is Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance: Poverty, Literacy, and the Development of Information Capital. Neuman recently wrote an essay for our Open a World of Possible initiative, reflecting upon her early experiences with reading, which we've repurposed here. The full version is also available in our new Open a World of Possible book, which you can download for free here.
For me, it was love at first sight. One of my first literary memories is reading a big picture book of Bible stories about David and Goliath, Samson and the lion, and all the wonderful heroes and villains in the Bible. The stories were a bit scary, but so vivid and compelling that I would want to read them again and again.
My love of books obviously took me to the library. And in those days, the librarian was formidable and quite stern. There were rules, she would say, that needed to be respected: No talking, hardly any whispering, a very strict check-out policy, and library fines galore. You were only allowed to take 10 books out each week—no more, so I devised a strategy. Each week I would take a shelf of books at a time from the biography section, starting with A . Week by week, I would strategically go through the alphabet, reading everything I could grab, satisfying my hunger for learning.
Carrying so many books home, some would inevitably fall out of my young hands and hit the ground. This put me into a panic, wondering what the stern librarian would think. Was the binding damaged? Did I get mud on the pages? Still, if she looked more closely, I trust she would have seen what probably had convinced her to become a librarian in the first place—the sheer joy and delight of a young child learning through books. That early excitement transformed me into a lifelong reader.
