WHEN THE READING LIGHT WENT ON

Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins mysteries, which include “Gone Fishin’,” “Black Betty” and “Devil in a Blue Dress”:

I started reading by reading comic books. I read the Marvel comic books, such as “Fantastic Four” and “Spiderman.”

I read comic books often, and my parents didn’t like it, but at least I was reading. I was so excited by the idea of images and the power they hold. It was incredible how those images could captivate me. And I wanted to understand the characters. Something pushes us to understand the characters when we read.

When you’re a kid, you’re not just reading; you’re making up stories. All kids make up stories. They may write these stories down or tell them out loud. You can’t write unless you read. All good writing originates in good reading.

I eventually moved on to novels. One of the best novels is “The Stranger” by Albert Camus because it’s the expression of 20th century life. One of my favorites is the “Simple” stories by Langston Hughes. [From 1943 to 1965, Hughes wrote stories about a fictional Harlem man Jesse B. Simple.] Now I’m reading “The Interpretation of Dreams” by Sigmund Freud.

Kids read if their parents read. That’s how you get kids to learn to love books. That’s the only way to convince them because they want to be like their mother and father. They see them read and then they decide to pick up a book.