Why Libraries and Books Are So Important to Me

Libraries have been an important part of my life. We did not have books at home and that is not to cast aspersions on my family at all. That was not a habit that we had. Like I had said before, my father read the Daily News religiously every day, but we didn't have books and I fell in love with books as soon as I started school. I learned to read pretty quickly by the end of first grade. I'm sure that I was an avid reader already and of course I had learned a lot of English by then.

My mother, in spite of the fact that it was hard to manage all three of us at the same time, in terms of going out and doing things with us, she managed to take us to the library every month and we would go to, it was a cute little library. Even then it was little, so it must have been really little if I remember it as little. And it was in the middle of this park in Williamsburg, beautiful little library, and we were allowed to take out six books each time and I always made sure to take out six books and so did Lydia and my mother would hold Freddy's hand, my brother's hand, to make sure he didn't run away. And I couldn't wait to get home. I just couldn't wait to get home to read those books. I read them very quickly, of course, and then longing to go back, but it would be another couple of weeks or a month before we would go back to get new books.

Then as a teenager, I was 16 years old, I was then at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and I got my first job. I applied at the Brooklyn Public Library and I loved working there. My job was to shelve books. Once in a while, they let me check books out for people and that was very exciting. But I just remember looking at all those books and wondering if anybody had ever read all of them and how on earth could you do that. And there also I was able to check out books, read them, bring them back.

So books have always been important, as you can see with the books that I brought for today because I always use them sort of as a reference point. So for me, writing and writing books has always been very fulfilling.

I wrote my first book at the age of 10 and I often tell that story. We were living in Fort Greene and I remember getting home every day going to my bedroom and sitting on the bed probably, I don't think we had a desk we used at the kitchen table for our desk, and writing every single day. And it was a story about somebody who was surprisingly just like me, but whose name, I probably gave her another name and whose family was very much like mine. And sadly, I threw it away after it was over a hundred pages long, probably thinking, "Who would want to read something that I wrote?" And I was only 10, but maybe that was sort of a message to me that I was meant to be writing.