The Gift of Reading

A Guest Post from Lorraine Segal 

About Lorraine Segal

After surviving the ’50s and ’60s, as well as twenty years in toxic academia as a professor, Lorraine Segal was inspired to start her own business, Conflict Remedy, happily teaching, coaching, blogging, and consulting around workplace conflict transformation. She is addicted to reading novels and enjoys walking in beautiful Northern California, where she lives with her wife. Her cartoon muse, Bookie, insisted that she write her memoir, Angels and Earthworms. For more information go to https://BooklingPress.com

From Chapter 1 Welcome to Downey, Future Unlimited

Library Liberation

One of the big gifts I was given in childhood was the gift of reading. Both parents read out loud to my sister and me. My father, Henry, worked in downtown Los Angeles and he would go to the huge children’s department in the main L.A. library, and get the librarians to help him choose books for us. The librarians adored him; it was unusual then for a man to do this for his young daughters. He would bring the books home in his black metal lunch box, and I still remember the excitement and anticipation we felt to see what treasurers he had brought!

I read my first “chapter” book when I was very young, and I have been reading, mostly novels, with memoirs, self-help books, and other non-fiction thrown in, with delight and enthusiasm ever since. I once estimated the number of books I’ve read in my life and I’m sure, conservatively, it is well over 12,000. My Aunt Rose also sent beautifully illustrated hardback children’s books each year for our birthdays, like Little Women, Alice in Wonderland, A Little Princess, Black Beauty. Some of them I still have.

In my challenging childhood, books were my friends, my comfort, my escape, feeding my sense of wonder and offering a window on a bigger world. They were also my key to understanding other people and other cultures. I read an article a few years ago which said that people who read novels tend to be more empathetic because they enter into the lives, perceptions, and feelings of people very different from them. This is certainly true of me and explains why I can easily feel empathy for people who have had a very different life experience from my own. I probably spent time with someone like them inside a book.

I particularly loved historical novels and fantasy and science fiction, appreciating the bigger escape not only from my particular life, but my time, my world, and my American culture.

The public library in Downey was small and limited, but once I was old enough to go, I loved it. I read just about everything in the children’s section by the time I was nine or ten, and moved on to the few shelves of young adult books.

The young adult section had a system of labeling that involved putting small pieces of sticky white tape with red symbols on the spine. There was a rocket ship for science fiction books, two hearts for the teen romances, and a magnifying glass for mysteries. I read everything.

The first science fiction book I read was by Robert Heinlein. It was either Rocket Ship Galileo or Orphans of the Sky. My imagination was captured by these outer space adventures that involved kids. I still have a soft spot for well-written science fiction and fantasy.

Then, by age eleven, I switched to the adult novel section. I would start at the “A”s, and stop when I reached the maximum number of books I could take out. I read trashy novels and classics indiscriminately.

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I can so relate to Lorraine’s reading experiences, although I have no clue how many books I have read in my lifetime! (Do I count the ones I did not finish?). Next week, I will talk about my memories of childhood reading in The Gift of Reading Part 2.