When I was four, my parents took me to the beach. I was entertaining myself with a huge, heavy volume by Theodore Dreiser.
“You have a very strange child,” a lady on the beach said to my parents. “She just sits there staring into this huge book for hours. And there aren’t even any pictures in it.”
“Oh no,” my mother said. “She’s reading. Come here, honey, tell us what the book is about.”
After I retold to the lady the beginning of Dreiser’s novel, she looked at me terrified and never came up to us again.
And I still love Dreiser passionately. I read his novel An American Tragedy over a dozen times and I can quote parts of it by heart.
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