The Book That Turned Me Into a Reader

What a great idea to create a link up book club! As soon as I saw this on Stephanie's blog Bassability I knew I had to link up - I have wanted to blog more about books in the last few weeks and I knew I had to join in!

The question for this week's No Stress Book Club post is: 

What book turned you into a reader?

I grew up with next to no television (ours had three channels and we were only allowed to watch about an hour of children's programmes a day) and reading took its place. My parents read aloud to my brother and myself and one of the books I loved so much that I couldn't stop looking at them and that really made me want to read was "Malwine in der Badewanne" ("The Mysterious Tadpole") by Steven Kellogg. This beautifully illustrated book tells the story of a boy who gets a special birthday present from an uncle who visited Scotland: a tadpole that keeps on growing until it gets even bigger than the bathtub. The German title "Malwine in der Badewanne" means "Malwine [the name of the tadpole] in the Bathtub" and I remember that even the title sounded weird and magical to me.

I am sure that I owe some of my passionate interest in books to this early reading experience and maybe my later fascination with the more unusual kind of fantasy literature has to do with the fact that Malwine is a very sweet kind of monster ...