From Our Founder
My passion for books began in my childhood. I remember like it was yesterday, savoring the book I was reading as we drove across the United States on our way from the East Coast to the West Coast, where my father would be stationed next. We were a military family and we went where my father, a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy, had received new orders. These orders were always on the coast—east or west—along with a stint in Hawaii before it was a state.
We moved often during my childhood, our residences Quonset huts, apartments, duplexes—one time a so-called house resembling a hut—for a year, two or three months, a few weeks, or sometimes a couple of days. When we returned to the states from Hawaii, our living quarters weren’t available, so we camped out for two weeks in Yosemite National Park. When I was eleven years old, my father was transferred to Coronado Naval Air Station, San Diego, and my parents bought our first home. I didn’t realize stability meant something other than packing up and moving and leaving friends—none of whose names I remember to this day. By the time I was twelve years old, I had attended sixteen different schools.
My education as a child didn’t happen only in the classroom. I have my father and mother to thank for that. My father drilled me on my arithmetic tables, the roll call of states and their capitals, and important historical dates and events, and he enlivened my imagination with colorful stories about the places he had visited around the world. Then there was this beautiful land of ours. My sisters and I watched captivated, as we traveled across the plains, through the desert, and into the mountains. It must have been during these trips when I fell in love with the desert, sensing that I had found a peace in the austerity of the heat. We also observed the people in the different regions of the country. We bought our food supplies in grocery stores or at stands along the way, and ate our lunches and dinners in parks and on the side of the road. As I remember it, we never once ate in a restaurant or stayed overnight in a motel.
Even with the back-and-forth between my father and me, the stories he told, and the games my mother and sisters and I invented to try to trick each other, I still needed books. My mother took care of this for me. She was adamant about giving us the best education she could, even as our classroom experience was transient. You could say the books she bought saved me during these trips—and beyond. Although I didn’t know it then, books were my escape from the instability in my life—moving from place to place often and enrolling in schools for maybe just a day or week. I was an introverted, shy girl, and it couldn’t have been easy making friends with the other children when I didn’t now how long they and I would be together. I thought my life was normal, that other families moved around as we did, but it didn’t seem to matter then. I had my books, a circumstance precisely made for me.
I immersed myself in books, read them as if they were my best friends, poured my heart into them. Sometimes at night when my father or mother had pulled over to the side of the road to sleep, I took out my trusty flashlight to read the last pages of my novel in the dark that surrounded us. Books took me away from myself, sparked my imagination, and nourished my mind and soul.
I wouldn’t have understood when I was a child that my craving for book nourishment was a passion, as it is to this day. This passion has led me to found the website bookscover2cover.com, where I can share my love for books with you. To inspire you to read the books we highlight and the reviews we publish. To invite you to participate and contribute however and whenever you might feel the urge. To believe, as we do, that books are power for the mind, food for the soul, and love for the heart.