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.

Jonathan Franzen ♥ Harriet the Spy

For me, the real introduction to New York was Harriet the Spy. . . a kid's book. The first time I ever fell in love with a character in literature, it was a girl from Manhattan. And I didn't just love her—I wanted to be her. Trade in my whole pleasant suburban life and move to the Upper East Side and be Harriet M. Welch, with her notebook and her flashlight and her hands-off parents.

Jonathan Franzen, "New York," in Matt Weiland & Sean Wilsey eds., State by State: A Panaramic Portrait of America (2008)