I want to start a somewhat different sort of conversation here: What made you into a book reader?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

13. I come from a long line of readers

My mother used to complain about how much money my father spent on books, but she admitted that the habit of reading before going to sleep had been passed down through the maternal line, at least from my great-grandmother's time.

The only time I can fall asleep without reading is if I have severe jet lag or am otherwise exhausted.

I learned to read early. In what would have been my kindergarten year, I had a couple of severe illnesses, and there were long periods of time in which I was still too sick to go back to school but too far recovered to just lie quietly in bed. My father was gone most of the day, and my mother had a two-year-old and an infant to take care of, so she didn't have a lot of time to entertain me.

Both my parents had put in time as elementary school teachers (my father in one-room schoolhouses in northern Minnesota and my mother in kindergarten and primary), so they decided to teach me to read. Once I got the hang of reading, I became a bookworm and read or tried to read everything I could find.

For years, I always carried a book in my purse, which was awkward at times. In recent years, I learned that one can put e-books on a phone, so now, whenever I have some downtime, I can pull out my small, compact phone and get a few pages in.