Book Girl: A Journey Through the Treasures & Transforming Power of a Reading Life by Sarah Clarkson.
Book Girl is one of those books about books that we readers love to read, both to join in the fandom and to peruse the book lists to see how many we can check off and how many treasures we have yet to discover. This book is full of lists and also full of tributes to the power and beauty of a reading life. I was hooked from the beginning.
So, I decided to start an in-person book club, and I unilaterally picked Book Girl to be the first book we would read together. I can’t wait for our first meeting later this month, so I also decided to write down some of my thoughts about Book Girl here on Semicolon. There are discussion questions in the back of the book, and I thought I’d answer a few of them here.
Book Girl Discussion Question #1: In the introduction, the author describes how she came to be a book girl. When did you realize you were a book girl? What people or circumstances contributed to your love of reading?
Well, the short answer is: I had a mother who read to me. The first story I remember clearly that my mom read to me was the story of Joseph from the book of Genesis in the Bible. That was such an exciting story!I could hardly wait to hear what would happen to Joseph and his brothers next. Would Joseph escape from Pharaoh’s prison? Would the brothers be able to return with food in time to relieve the famine-stricken family? Would Jacob ever find out that his beloved son was not really dead? What would Joseph do to revenge himself on his mean brothers? I don’t know if the reading of this and other stories from the Bible made me a “book girl,” but they certainly made me a Story Girl.
Then, in first grade, I learned to read. And my mother began to take me to the library each week. There I was allowed to check out ten books, only ten books, no more and certainly I never left with fewer than ten. I first fell in love with the Snipp, Snapp, Snurr books and the Flicka, Ricka, Dicka series by Maj Lindman. Then, I graduated to the Twins series by Lucy Fitch Perkins: The Irish Twins, The Dutch Twins, The Japanese Twins, and so on. Something about triplets and twins was absolutely fascinating to my six or seven year old mind.
So, that’s when I first became a book girl. My mother, my first grade teacher, Miss Milsap, and the children’s librarians at Tom Green County library in San Angelo, Texas all had a hand in making me into a girl who loved stories, a girl who loved to read, a girl who craved books. My mother probably didn’t read to me while I was still in the womb the way Sarah Clarkson says her mother did, but she began reading to me soon after I was born. And she kept on reading to me and enabling my book addiction as I grew up. How did you become a book girl or boy?
I don’t remember whether my mother read to me or not, but I’ve loved reading ever since I first learned how in 1st grade.
Oh–and I loved reading the Maj Lindman books to my kids! I didn’t come across them as I was growing up, but we discovered them in our regular trips to the library.
I’ve been a reader for as long as I’ve had memories, but it’s not because my mother read to me. Neither of my parents were readers, especially my father, but I do remember my mother reading a lot of those old movie magazines from the fifties and early sixties. I guess even that was an example of something that seemed to give her so much pleasure that it made me curious about this whole reading thing. I also had an aunt who was only five years older than me and I admired the way she was always reading books and magazines. I think she may have been the tipping point for me because of the way she encouraged me to read on my own before I was five years old – and supplied the books for me to practice on.
Much the same way. My mother always read bedtime stories to us, even when we grew old enough to read to ourselves we would read chapter books together, like Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember fondly many trips to the public library when I came home with piles of books I could barely carry. I still tend to check out more books than I really have time to read!