Reba Orton's Page

I first discovered the world of books at the bookmobile, which parked only a block or so down the street from my home at the Catholic School playground.  I started with comic books of cute characters like Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck and studiously avoided the comics geared towards action adventure.   After running out of those comics to read, I looked high and low all around the bookmobile for something to read.  I found the Hardy Boys series and read book after book of this series.  After consuming those novels, I complained that the bookmobile didn't have anything more to offer me.  My mother told me that there was a library at my school.  I was flabbergasted!  I didn't know that!  I started reading books voraciously at the school library.  I remember reading J. R. Tolkien's books there.  I was in fifth grade at the time.  My grandmother told me that reading saved me, a deaf student, from a tedious, ignorant, and mundane fate in the mainstreamed educational track.  In junior high school, my reading skills expanded.  I still remember reading my first science fiction book there about a space cadet who had photographic memory.  In one English class, I read the entire textbook full of short stories before the first week was out and spent the most of the semester immediately writing out answers to a handout full of questions about each short story because I didn't need to read the short story first during class.  Needless to say, I needed to be in a more advanced English class and they placed me in a grammar class where I learned all about grammar from a little red textbook.   Most of these lessons stuck with me even to this day.  I also remember desperately wanting to buy Trixie Belden books at K-Mart and even tried to read a few chapters while standing in the shopping aisle.  At the high school library, I explored other genres such as fairy tales, mythology, new age, etc.  Even the people in my life introduced me to new genres.  My mother introduced me to psychology books and my best friend introduced romance books to me.  In addition, I went to the local public libraries to find more books to read during the summer time and this was where I discovered Star Trek novels and became a Trekkie.  At one point, I kept track of the books I read in a year on paper and it listed over a hundred titles.  I was proud to have read so many books.   They opened an entirely new and completely accessible world to me.  I could understand them clearly and books did not get annoyed when I need something repeated back to me because I didn't understand them the first time.  Books were wonderful!