The term "voracious reader" gets thrown around a lot, but I honestly believe the phrase was invented to describe my mom.
That woman reads a book a night--her bed is often strewn with literary flings from previous evenings--and on long family car trips she was somehow able to sit up front and read contently, warding off motion sickness and tuning out my brothers' and my hilarious, 150-decibel song parodies (we thought "I got chicken, babe," a take on Sonny & Cher, was particularly clever, and I have no idea why).
So a huge part of my childhood--approximately 90% of it, in fact--was spent trying to get my mom to hurry the hell up in our visits to the library in our small rural town. Sure, I loved going to the library and picking out a fresh stack of books for myself, but there were times, as my mom stood at the front counter discussing the details of a new mystery with the librarian, that I crumpled dramatically behind the romance shelf and moaned, "I'm actually going to die here!"
Looking back, my mom's library trips probably took no more than 30 minutes, and as I got older, I started spending more time there myself, completely voluntarily. That library became one of my favorite places in the world.
Today, the librarians there are huge fans of Daddy Likey, and have done so much to support me and my writing (including ordering two copies of my upcoming book!), so I wanted to give them a shout out and a recommendation for an adorable (and affordable) librarian-appropriate necklace.
Also, an adorable (and unaffordable) librarian-appropriate necklace:
