Prologue

Anna’s and my own reading journey both go back to days when she was newborn baby. I was reading to her every day. I always loved books and reading, although that love started quite late, when I turned 13. I wish I had been introduced to books earlier in my life. However during my childhood years there were few children’s books in Iran. It was the time when Iran was fighting bloody war with Iraq. War lasted 8 years and those years were practically void of cultural events I could attend and only books available to me were school textbooks.

I was still in the middle school when one of my classmates brought a book to me. It was one of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpieces, “Anna Karenina.” I was surprised to finish reading it in just few days. It was my first experience and I fell in in love with books. It was such an exciting time! Honestly, I even started getting better grades in school after that. I found my favorite writers with whom I could share my thoughts and feelings. I was still teenage but I loved to read the world’s big writers: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, Anatole France, Alexander Dumas, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and many more…

But subconsciously there was still something missing. I found it when Anna (my baby girl) was born. It turned out I was missing children’s literature that I did not have access to in my childhood. True, I was reading great literature in my teenage years, but it was not the same as reading age-appropriate literature as one grows up.  It is very important to read children’s books during childhood because it helps to develop child’s imagination. Since I started reading for my child I was thrilled to read every single children’s book I could get hold of.  I believe in some way, I was trying to fill the gap in my own education. Most of the time, we ended our shopping in a book store, where Anna and I were hanging around children’s section for very long.   Reading children books was—and still is—a delightful and funny activity.

After a while we realized that Anna has the same passion for books and we can help her to read all by herself. Besides daily reading activities, we were playing with letters, singing songs, making rhymes, touching letters in her foamy alphabet carpet to feed her tactile sense. Anna started to recognize all 26 letters when she was only 13 months. We were very enthusiastic that our method seemed to work. Finally she started reading a whole book all by herself when she was 3 years and 4 months. I will never forget the happy moment when my husband told me that Anna read him Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax at the story time!