This week’s Booking through Thursday asks:

What is the first book you remember reading? What about the first that made you really love reading?

Is it wrong that I don’t know the answer to these questions? I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to read, although my grandmother assures me that one winter she and my grandfather left for Florida with me not knowing how to read and came back two or so months later and I did. Plus, obviously I didn’t just come out of the womb with a book in my hand, although if I had it most certainly would have explained the wait I caused my parents: “Just a few more minutes. I’ll be born when I finish this chapter!”

I’d like to say my first book could have been one by Richard Scarry, although those probably came later with my brother. Certainly I was quite taken with Scarry’s Please and Thank You Book when I was five or so and still cite it as a favorite. We had Little Golden Books, so it could have been one of those. Or maybe An Invitation to the Butterfly Ball? — I recall its beautiful pictures. That scratch-and-sniff Winnie the Pooh book? A Babar story? Curious George? Mum? Dad? Any recollection?

I do recall being in first grade and being quite smitten by Snow White and Rose Red in my elementary school library. It was on the shelf by the door where the Beatrix Potter books were kept and was roughly the same size. That was probably the first book I checked out on several separate occasions (and, to this day, one of the few) just because I liked the story so much.

And I know that I really felt that my brother ought to get started on his reading while he was still quite young. The physically smallest book we owned was a copy of Rosemary Wells’ Noisy Nora, and I routinely would interrupt Josh’s playing to try and walk him through the words on the pages. It was not a success and probably helped put him off reading for many years.

(In retrospect, I probably would have been better off with Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go instead of a book about a girl mouse who found her baby brother annoying. (In all fairness, she found her older sister a pain, too.))

How about you? What books helped give you your first foray into reading? Share with us in the comments…