Welcome, and please come in. I made this page with the help of the Tuesday morning computer class at my branch library, and I ask your patience with it. It is a small room, and I have tried to keep it a quiet one.

Why I read

I was born in Ibadan, in the Western Region of Nigeria, in 1936. My father was a schoolmaster who kept his books in a tin trunk to protect them from the damp and the ants, and the sound of that lid opening is one of my earliest memories. He lifted the books out one at a time, as if they might bruise.

I read because it is the only way I know to be in two places at once. I read because a story, told well, asks you to be patient with a stranger until he is no longer a stranger. That is most of what I tried to teach, over forty years, to children who mostly wanted to know where the joke books were. I showed them the joke books too. You have to earn the right to hand a child anything else.

I came to Maryland to study in 1956 and, as my mother predicted with some sorrow, I did not go home. I began work as a school librarian in Baltimore County in the autumn of 1959, and this past June I closed the door on my fortieth school year.

What forty years of story hour taught me

• Children will sit still for a good sentence. They will not sit still for a lecture.
• Read the book yourself first. Always.
• A child who asks for the same book every week is not stuck. She is building a house, and she needs the same bricks.
• The quiet ones are listening hardest.
• Never tell a child a book is too old for him. Tell him it will wait for him.

Ten books that made me

1. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. It was published in 1958, and it was the first time I saw my own part of the world set down in a novel with that kind of seriousness. I read it in a Baltimore boarding house and felt, for an evening, not so far away.
2. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. From the mission school. A plain girl who would not be spoken over.
3. Middlemarch, by George Eliot. For its last page, which says that "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts." A school librarian takes comfort in that.
4. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. Janie under the pear tree. I have given this book to more young women than any other.
5. Aké: The Years of Childhood, by Wole Soyinka. A boyhood in Abeokuta, in the same years as my own girlhood. I laughed aloud on the bus.
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. For Mrs. Flowers, who gives the silent child books and reads aloud to her. I wanted to be Mrs. Flowers. Some days I nearly was.
7. Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White. "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer." I read that last chapter aloud perhaps two hundred times and never once got through it with a steady voice.
8. The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats. Peter in his red snowsuit, and the snowball in his pocket that is gone when he looks for it. The children always gasp at that page. So do I.
9. Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. Because the supper is still hot. Every child needs to know that the supper will still be hot.
10. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle. For Meg Murry, with her glasses and her temper, who turned out to be exactly the right person.

The green chair

My husband, Samuel, died in the winter of 1997. He was an engineer with the county roads department and not, by his own cheerful admission, a reader of novels. But every evening after supper he sat in the green armchair by the front window, first with the newspaper and then with whatever I had left on the arm of the chair, and in thirty-four years he finished every book I left there. He did not say much about them. He would tap the cover twice when he was done, which meant it was good.

The chair is still by the window. I have not moved it. Some evenings I still leave a book on the arm, from habit, and I find that I do not mind the habit.

The ones who came back

The best part of the work came late. In the last ten years or so, they began to come back: a nurse, a bus driver, a young man in a very good suit, a mother with a baby on her hip. They would stand at the desk and say my name as if they were surprised it still worked, and tell me which book it had been. I did not always remember the child. I always remembered the book.

Thank you for sitting a while. If you would like to tell me which book made you, I would be glad to hear it.

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