Welcome to What’s Brewing!
I was interviewed today as part of a book reviewer’s “author interview” section of her blog. She asked me…
How important were books when you were a child?
I didn’t have to even think about that question, the answer was “essential!” I learned to read by the time I was four years old. I watched others around me read and I knew those things called books were filling with important stuff, that I wanted to know about. My love of books began at four.
In those days of course there were also inky newspapers, magazines both glossy and plain paper, pamphlets and booklets. Once I knew those squiggles meant words, I literally read everything in front of me.
Her second question was…
How important were libraries when you were a child?
Again my answer was… essential. Without a library, I would not have been able to read the number of books I did. Books were quite expensive , so my mother would take us to the library. We were allowed four books each. My twin brother would choose two books and I would choose six! He wasn’t that interested in reading, whereas I was an avid fan. If you couldn’t find me during the weekend it was because I was in my favourite tree, reading!
When I was fifteen I started to think about the kind of career I wanted to have. I went to boarding school and I took one look at the school library and decided it needed to be overhauled. There was no fulltime librarian at the school, so I spent hours after classes re-arranging, cataloguing and listing every book in the library. It was a small school with over 1000 books and it took me about 3-4 weeks of every day after school to do the job.
In that year I thought I might like to be a librarian but it never happened. I’ve managed to go to libraries all my life and now I write books to put in them…isn’t life an interesting journey?!
Books, brews, and blessings,
Melody
P.S. Launch Date for The Angel Tea House is Monday, 10 July 2023 -only 17 days to go. You can pre-order here.
