The joy of reading

For me, the joy of reading came early — starting with the books of Bill Peet and moving quickly on to, well, a lot of authors and subjects. The books that shaped the course of my life all came to me when I was between nine and eleven years old: A Night to Remember, Watership Down, and Inside the Atom. I learned from these books that tragedy is inherent in human life, that the beauty of life is worth fighting for, and that the whole of it is a chemical…