Confession: I can probably count on one hand the number of books that I read between my college graduation and the birth of my first child. And if I was reading very little before becoming a mother, I basically stopped reading altogether after I started having kids.  But I wasn’t always a non-reader. My childhood and teen years were marked first by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Anne of Green Gables, and then by The Lord of the Rings, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens. I remember showing up to my high school job a few minutes late and with a tear-stained face because I just had to finish Great Expectations before my shift started.

The beginning of my non-reading started in college, oddly enough.  As a music major a lot of my free time was spent in the practice rooms. I read what I had to for my classes, and that was about it.  One of the greatest lessons I learned as a music major was that to get good at something you have to practice, everyday. When I stopped the practice of reading, I got really bad at it.