Carol Jago is an author of six books for teachers and has taught English in middle and high school for 32 years. She is also the past president of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and serves as an associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. She recently wrote an essay for our Open a World of Possible initiative, reflecting upon an early experience with reading. We've repurposed the essay here. The full version is also available in our new Open a World of Possible book, which you can download for free here.
"When I was ten years old, I was in the car taking my mother to the hospital to give birth to my youngest brother. The route to the hospital passed the library and I was unreasonably
(according to my father) insistent that we stop so that I could take out another book.
That story has passed into family folklore but it illustrates how I read as a child. I read anything: lives of the saints, romantic novels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Huxley, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald—anything and everything in print without discrimination.
Did I understand all I read? Without doubt, I did not, but a childhood spent among books prepared me for a lifetime as a reader. The thrill of opening a new book has never gone away."
