Expanding Your World

The books you read as a child have a great impact. You learn about the world, real and imagined.  Through the pages of books you experience friendship, betrayal, love, fear, and pain.  All of these experiences gained through reading help to shape the choices you make.  Reading gives you the vocabulary to express your thoughts and feelings.  Reading aquaints you with ideas and cultures that are very different from those of your own family and neighborhood.

Children's book authors have an important role. They are part of the village that raises todays children. When parents, teachers and librarians guide children to the best books, they are nourishing them perhaps more than they do with bread and fruit.  If you influence a child, find a great children's book and share it with him.  You both will be greatly enriched.

“It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations--something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.”

- Katherine Patterson

“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.”

- John Berger