Mama took me almost every weekday in the summer to our local library when I was a little kid.  She was a voracious reader and instilled the same love in me.  I was able to get lost in my own little world.  It didn’t involve watching TV and, mercifully, it was in the air-conditioning.  I remember they had a bulletin board for summer readers and each time you completed a book you got a star sticker under your name.  There was a contest to see who could read the most books.  I realized, despite my inherently competitive nature, it did not matter how quickly one could read; the joy was in the journey.  Even now I have been known to slow down toward the end of a book just to savor it a bit longer.  My sweet, quiet, lady-like little mother loved murder mysteries.  She read hundreds of them.  I think when I was a kid she read all 66 of Agatha Christie’s novels like Murder on the Orient Express.  Then I remember her adoring The Cat Who … series.  A Google search says there were 29 of those and the title that sticks with me is The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare.  After that I found she was into the Navajo murder series by Tony Hillerman.  I believe the first book was entitled The Blessing Way.  Mama was never without a book.  I suspect Daddy thought they may have been frivolous since they were fiction and he preferred non-fiction books on history and politics; my husband prefers the same.  I have been reading historical romance novels since I was ten; to be frank — they are sometimes referred to as “bodice rippers.”  I used to be SO embarrassed by the covers I would use something else to put in front of them.  I loved to read on my lunch break when I was working at Lord & Taylor in my early twenties.  A book is a treasure.  It is something in which one can escape whenever one is able and, unlike a movie, it is your own imagination that fuels it.  My earliest literary loves were the Madeline series (thrilled it’s now my little girl’s favorite as well) and the Frog and Toad books.  I do not recall having a suggested summer reading list until the second grade.  Now they have kiddos reading in kindergarten.  Our little girl is doing pretty well I think to be entering first grade this coming school year.  We have tons of books we bought to read to her as a baby, but I realized she has few she can read on her own.  So I broke down and bought her half a dozen “Step Into Reading” books.  To my delight, she has eschewed both the television and her iPad in favor of them.  Designating my bench by the window as her reading place, she has even had the nerve to “shush” me several times when it interrupted her concentration.  The American best selling author Sarah Addison Allen said, “Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories.  And there are still so many more books to read.  I’m a work in progress.”  I love this quote and share the same sentiment.  We’re all a work in progress … just keep reading.