[xendula]

I grew up in a house full of classics, which I had absolutely no interest in as a child (there wasn't a single children's book in our house, and My infrequent bedtime stories were greek mythology, which hardly interested me at a young age).

I discovered that books can actually be interesting to children when I got my first library card, and I remember walking for 30 minutes each way with a heavy backpack on my back, full of books.

My folks sneered at the lowly children's, and later YA books, and never really encouraged it. They forced me to read "real" literature and the confrontation over what I was reading became too much of a fight the older I got, so I stopped reading in German to avoid fights at about 14.

Luckily, my home town library had a lot of foreign titles, and those were acceptable to my folks because of the foreign language learning disguise, so I pretty much read any book I could borrow in the foreign language section: first I went through the English section, then French, then Spanish and Italian. They even had all Asterix and Obelix comics in any language you can imagine, including Latin, so I read all of the ones I could understand.

Without our library, I would have never been the bookworm that I was. I guess that's why I am such a big proponent of libraries.

As an adult, life and the internet got in the way, and only my first Kindle brought me back into the avid reader world. Love my kindle, love my libraries.