Here's an excerpt:
Each day featured the same conversation when I would face the same questions, which I was always eager to answer. He would call me to him and lift me up onto his knee, settle me down and say: “What are you reading? Who is it by? What is it about?” I was expected to tell him the story in my own words, describe the characters and explain the plot. If it was a long book it would be told in instalments over several days. Often Dad would ask for finer details or more information and most times I could supply it. Once in a while though I was hazy on some points and tried to avoid his interrogation. Then he would suggest, kindly, that I should read the chapter again because I had missed parts of it. That way I learned to read carefully and to remember what I had read, two skills that were to prove very useful to me later. Best of all was when I had finished a book and I faced a different set of questions. “Did you enjoy it? Why?” And after that he would want to know if I thought he would enjoy it too and we would compare what we liked in books and what made us want to give up reading them. That was when I could truly talk freely to my father about the world, books, fiction, reality and everything that was important to me as a child. And he would listen.
