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By Sara Tomlinson
| Friday, April 17, 2015 Off the Shelf
Kids are not known for their self-control. When I was little,
if given the chance, I would gorge myself on Swedish Fish—or, more often,
Wha Guru Chews, the health food–sanctioned candies my mom actually allowed
me to eat. And whenever I sat down and started reading, I couldn’t seem to
stop.
Especially when I was supposed to be doing my chores.
For a brief, heady time when I was seven or eight, my book
binge of choice was Nancy Drew. Of course, it’s a natural human instinct to
want to know whodunit. But there was something more that kept me coming
back. Nancy Drew was my first experience of reading not just as a bedtime
activity that could delay my inevitable war with insomnia, or something
done in school for a grade.
But rather, reading as an enchantment, reading
as an almost narcotic compulsion so pleasurable it could make time and
space disappear, reading as a perfect hideaway.
But I intuitively understood new books required two things we
didn’t have in abundance in the 740-square-foot house my mom and stepdad
built for us in the woods of mid-coast Maine: money and space. Not to
mention that the nearest town, which was eight miles away, wasn’t even big
enough to have a bookstore in those days,... READ
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