1. I don’t remember not being able to read.
2. In 2nd or 3rd grade, the girl down the street told me she didn’t like to read, and I didn’t understand how anyone could not like to read.
3. I have never not read fantasy. The only of my favorites that weren’t fantasy were the Little House books, and the big books of Greek and Native American mythology.
4. On a family vacation when I was (in elementary school?), I met a woman who had known Laura Ingalls Wilder.
5. Despite that, I didn’t realize books were written by actual people until I was in my early 20s. Similarly, it never occurred to me to write down all the stories I made up in my head.
6. I no longer finish every book I start.
7. The summer between college and grad school, I read well over a book a day, including a lot of things I didn’t particularly like, because I wanted to be familiar with them. Most of my life, my average was more like 1-2 a week.
9. I don’t fetishize books as physical objects, although I no longer tear off and eat the corners of the pages.
10. I have not read most of the books I own, especially the nonfiction.
11. I didn’t move from the library’s juvenile section to the adult section, or discover that it had a science fiction section, until the summer I was 12 or 13 and volunteered there. I spent a lot of time shelving books. Before then, it hadn’t occurred to me that anything outside juvenile would be interesting.
12. As I remember, in elementary school, I took the reading book home on the first day of class and read the whole thing, every year, and never thought that was odd.
13. I heard “Put that book down now!” rather a lot as a child.
14. I stopped reading on May 31, 2002. The next novel I read was probably that December.
15. I’m slowly starting again – have read about five novels this year, not counting the ones on tape.
16. When I started this I didn’t think I could come up with 15 things, and now I’ve thought of many more.