Guest blogger Mindy Klasky is the author of six fantasy novels, including the award-winning, best-selling The Glasswrights’ Apprentice and numerous short stories. Her latest novel, Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft, is a lighthearted, fictional tale featuring a love-struck D.C. librarian who discovers she’s a witch. A portion of proceeds from the sale of Girl’s Guide will benefit First Book.

When I first heard about First Book’s What Book Got You Hooked? campaign, I started thinking.

The first books that I remember handling on my own were Dick and Jane readers that my parents bought at an educational supply house. I enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment when I sounded out words, but I never really cared about Dick, Jane, or Spot.

I remember going to the public library and checking out dozens and dozens of picture books at a time. (Those trips were as much an exercise in counting as they were in reading!) While I loved specific pages of specific books (Goodnight, Nobody!”), the books themselves weren’t yet magical for me.

In elementary school, I came to love the Scholastic Book sales. Each paperback book cost twenty-five cents, and if you ordered four, you could select a fifth for free. Each month, I marveled at the range of books that arrived. There were some volumes that every one of my classmates ordered, and some where I was — incredibly — the only person who recognized the value of the story. I still own my copy of Ruth Chew’s No Such Thing As a Witch, and Betty Brock’s No Flying in the House, but even those books failed to ignite a specific passion for reading.

Mindy Klasky with Katie from First Book at BookExpo America

I remember graduating to the library’s wall of chapter books, in alphabetic order by author. I know that I discovered some of my favorite authors there — Ruth M. Arthur (with her long-out-of-print juvenile Gothics), John Christopher (with his boy’s science fiction), Zilpha Keatley Snyder (with her books that swung wildly from pure fantasy to pure realism, with a healthy dose of imagination stirred in.) Each was wonderful in its own way, but none stood out as the specific volume that got me hooked on reading — and writing — forever.

But the longer that I thought about what book got me hooked, the more I settled on one single title: Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, by E. L. Konigsberg. I liked the challenge of remembering the title even before I opened the book. I came to adore the characters, especially poor Elizabeth, transplanted to a new school. But most of all, I fell in love with the art of storytelling, with the careful revealing of plot and character, the sculpting of a novel so that the reader gradually came to know even more than the narrator did about the story being told.

I think about my own take on magic and friendship, Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft, and I realize just how many of my writing skills have their seed in the stories of my childhood. I was well and truly hooked by Jennifer and Company - and I’ve never regretted a moment of my lifelong romance with reading.