Good reading culture; parents to kids

The one thing I recall from my childhood is an old bookshelf my father kept in the living room of our small house. The books were arranged in categories; illustrated children books, pacesetters, adult novels, college textbooks, Weekly Review Magazines, Reader’s Digest magazines, old Daily Nation newspapers and anything else made of paper that my father brought home.

The moments I most cherished were the days I sat with my father for long hours rearranging the bookshelf, drowning cups upon cups of milk tea, laughing and wiping away cockroach skeletons. This bookshelf provided my first reading materials. We lived too far from Nairobi, in the sugar growing region of Western Kenya. In terms of formative events and early experiences that concretized my interest in reading and writing, I can trace my beginnings to this period of my childhood when I sat at my father’s feet in front of the bookshelf. Sometimes father read fables to us.