Can you remember what your first novel was? Mine was The Hobbit. When I was five years old, my dad began to read it aloud to me before I went to bed. He was always pretty busy–at that point, he was on the local Parks and Recreation commission in my hometown and teaching a night class in business management at the local community college–but he made sure to make time to read to me. I can still remember listening to the chapter “Riddles in the Dark” and Dad doing Gollum’s voice.
The next year, when I went to first grade, I decided that I wanted to experience the story again, and so I took the book off of the shelf and took it to school with me. My teacher was, to put it mildly, surprised to see a six year old reading a full novel. She asked if I was actually reading it, and I said that I was. She asked if I understood what I was reading, and I said that I did. She asked me to read a paragraph aloud to her and then tell her what it said in my own words, and I did. It never occurred to me that I was doing anything unusual.
While I have been reading for as long as I can remember, I can date my love of books to this story. This was the first book that I read with a plot, the first one that I read with characters that I could vividly imagine, the first one that really transported me. It has remained with me, living rent free in my head, for almost the entirety of my life.