Does anyone remember when they first learned to read? I think I was around four and a half years old and I was certainly able to read by the time I was five. Having learned to read I just could not stop and I one of those kids who finish the school's reading scheme several years before they are supposed to. My mother enrolled me in the library as soon as the rules allowed me to but I was weedling books from the adult section long before I reached the age where the library would allow me to borrow books from there in my own right.

I can still clearly remember Birtley library; the old library. It was tucked away between two shops at the bottom of the high street. It was small by today's standards and it now houses a hardware shop. When I was still too young to have tickets of my own, the librarian would sit me down on a wooden bench below the librarian's station and give me Beatrix Potter books to look at. The children's section occupied one stack right opposite the librarian, so she could keep an eye on those horrible children. Birtley got a brand-new, bright and shining library a few years later, but that modern purpose-built building has never had the same fascination for me as the old one. There was something about the hushed and reverent atmosphere, the smell of the books and the dimmed light. The new library is all bright lights, comfortable chairs and children are allowed to talk, for heaven's sake! Scandalous! That old librarian would have had conniptions.

I took the usual route through Enid Blyton's Famous Five books and the Mallory Towers and St Clair's school stories, with a side-order of Elinor M Brent Dyer's Chalet School novels. To this day, I still love the Chalet School. The novels covered the years from the 1930's to the 1960's and the wealth of detail of clothes, manners, mores and slang is fascinating. Other childhood favourites included CS Lewis, Catherine Storr and the Classics. Every Christmas and birthday I would be given 2/6 (two shillings and sixpence) which was always spent on more books.

In the 1970's my family moved to New Zealand and my pocket money was now $1. Every friday evening, father would drive my sister and I to town. While he did the shopping and picked mother up from work, my sister and I would first go to the library to exchange our books and then go to the bookshop to spend our pocket money. More Chalet School books at first, but I had recently discovered science fiction so I also spent my money on Ray Bradbury, JG Ballard and Isaac Asimov.

How I came to love science fiction is quite a story. I was in the sixth form and we had been given Graham Greene's A Gun For Sale to read for English. When it came to the next day's class, the teacher asked us to get the book out and at least start reading it that day. When I told him I had read it overnight he sent me off to the library to get another book to occupy my time. Another English teacher there suggested I try Franz Kafka's The Trial, which I did read and thoroughly enjoyed. A few days later I took that book back to the school library to exchange it and my English teacher suggested that, since I had enjoyed Franz Kafka, I would be interested in JG Ballard. I got Vermillion Sands out of the library, and I have enjoyed a love affair with that book ever since. I re-read it at least once a year and it never fails to move and astound me. If you haven't tried it, go ahead! After that science fiction was all I ever read. Because of it I went to a science fiction convention in Birmingham in 1980 and met the man I later married. So thanks Mr Hunt of Western Heights High School in Rotorua, for getting me to like SF.

Happily, I married a man who also loves to read and we had a daughter who is another in the same mould. She, bright child, could read before she was four years old and, as I did all those years ago, she spends all her pocket money on books. These days she tends to prefer to read books on rewilding, ecology, and birds. I still read SF, but now I tend to prefer "golden age" crime and horror.

Some Authors you might enjoy trying:

Elinor M Brent Dyer
JG Ballard
Ray Bradbury
SP Somtow
'Miss Read'
Terry Pratchett
Angela Brazil
Ursula K Le Guin
Agatha Christie
Christiane Brand
William Hope Hodgeson
HP Lovecraft

And of course, the classics such as the Bronte Sisters, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins and CS Lewis.