Fourth-grade reading binge

The summer between fourth and fifth grades I spent almost entirely by myself reading in a room on the third floor of Mount Kisco, where I went through all of Dumas, eight volumes of Louisa May Alcott (starting with Little Women), Treasure Island, and a stirring adventure series by a man named Knipe. I counted up at the end, found that I had read around one hundred books, and wrote my parents that I was "positively floating in books." I couldn’t have been happier. Unfortunately, this early passion for reading somehow diminished after the fifth grade, until I read only sporadically. A little later on I was concentrating on movie magazines, Redbook, and Cosmopolitan. Later still, I resumed reading, particularly loving Dickens’s Great Expectations and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. 

Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), p. 50.