How do you learn to LOVE to read?

After a great Thanksgiving dinner, I watched as everyone in my niece’s immediate family walked out of the door clutching doggy bags. My niece couldn’t. This tween didn’t have enough hands. She was holding a stack of books to her chest so she wouldn’t drop them as she walked down the stairs.

My niece, H, loves to read, and when I called her over to check out her stash, she had an interesting mix: The Holy Bible ( a youth edition), Jerry Spinelli’s Love, Stargirl, and Mitch Albom’s Have a Little Faith, to name a few.

H loves Judy Moody, Wimpy Kids, Judy Blume, and so many others.

But wait, the others do, too.

My teenaged niece, T, made this clear to me a few months earlier, “Aunt K, we all read, but we just don’t read like H does.”

“I see. There is a difference between appreciating books and loving them the way she does,” I said.

But how did this happen?

They all had their own little libraries.

They were all read to.