Salutations!

My professor for CLS 534 Adult Programming for Public Libraries in Summer 2022 wanted to get to know us individually as readers and tasked us with writing our autobiographies in this specific context. The entirety of my essay is in the Google Drive folder “Documents/Presentations (MSLS & Beyond);” below are the TL;DR highlights (in my humble opinion):

• My journey of actually learning to read was difficult and tearful; my mom remembers me sitting in her lap crying over “Hooked on Phonics” almost daily, since we began homeschooling when I was around “kindergarten” age. Somehow one day, the words on the page, what they meant, and how they connected to oral language, must have all clicked in my brain because I have been an avid reader for as long as I can remember.
• Since I loved the book Stuart Little by E. B. White so much after meeting the Littles when I was eight or nine, my parents and I actually made an audiobook recording on cassette tape to accompany my cousin’s Christmas present one year – a hardback copy of the darling story of the family living in New York whose second son is somewhat like a mouse. A couple of years later, my cousin would actually recommend to me the one and only novel she had read that she thought I would enjoy, namely Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn-Dixie.
• My high-school years found me roaming the Canadian countryside with orphan Anne Shirley, trying to speak eloquently like Elinor Dashwood, spending time with the March sisters in Massachusetts, and identifying keenly with the protagonist of Jane Eyre for still slightly unbeknownst reasons, considering I have never been a governess.
• Reading has had tremendous significance in my life to date and has definitely played a major role in who and what I am today; reading is important to me because it allows me to go on adventures not likely to happen in my real life in the modern day; it is how I process most information since I am a visual learner; it connects me to different or similar emotions and personality characteristics I want to cultivate or avoid; I can go around the world without leaving home or achieve time-travel to have a cup of tea with a dear friend. Likewise, I find as an adult that my growing collection of vintage and rare books affords the opportunity for me to hold onto a bit of a stranger’s life through the inscriptions and notes written inside, such as pages left in the two English college textbooks dated April 15, 1943, and to vicariously relive my favorite historical eras through books that would have been indicative of pop culture in bookshops throughout the country with their release, such as my 1936 copy of Susannah of the Mounties by Muriel Denison that is a Shirely Temple movie tie-in edition.
• My feelings and attitudes about reading are the reason I have the goals I do in regards to library and information science. Deep down, even when I couldn’t articulate it, I have always believed God blessed me with my love of books. He gave me a curiosity about people and places that is usually satisfied by well-written novels, a thirst for information typically quenched by well-researched answers, and a respect for how books can be little puzzle pieces from bygone times. “Librarian” checks those boxes quite well.

RLGing,

Sarah Hope

PS. I feel like this GIF of Brigitta Von Trapp from The Sound of Music (1965) pretty much sums up my childhood via GIPHY. The GIF doesn’t really open up properly, so you might need to use the link.☺