As a child, when the time came for my reading lesson I would hide. My parents had to bodily drag me from my hiding place as I cried and screamed my protest: "I hate reading!"

This went on every day for weeks (I pray I will have the same patience with my children as my parents did with me in those days) until one day I discovered a book whose title my much-resisted new skills allowed me to read. 'King Arthur And His Knights'. That afternoon I cloistered myself away in my room, struggling through the first page. Many of the words didn't make sense, for my lessons had not yet introduced me to many of the nuances of pronunciation and my vocabulary was appropriately that of a six year-old.

The next day I did not hide. Nor the next. Each day that followed I worked diligently and paid rapt attention, and my dear overworked mother didn't question her sudden good fortune until the day I walked in carrying a book printed more than fifty years before. "How do you say this word?" Guinevere.

I have not stopped reading since, and that book is one of my most treasured possessions.