“The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
As soon as I read this description as a middle school student, I felt it applied to me. Except of course that I still cannot really read books in German, and French takes me long enough to comprehend that it is only an occasional rainy night activity for me to try to read a book in French. As a child I remember my parents taking my reading privileges away when I was in trouble and sometimes forcing me to stop reading to play outside. I see now of course that they were right. I did read too much, and a dose of reality was what was needed. The need to "gobble" books has not gone away, though...in fact sometimes it seems as bad as ever.
Are you a book gobbler too? Did you start gobbling as a child or did the craving come on more recently? Share your stories in the comments!
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