Interview with ForeWord Reviews

This link leads to the full text of an interview with ForeWord Reviews.

You can see in this first response, I "out" myself as a Little House on the Prairie man:

ForeWord Reviews: When did you start reading, and what did you like to read as a child?

Alex Kudera: I believe my first attempt at reading a novel was around age seven when I read Little House on the Prairie. I can’t tell you why I skipped Little House in the Big Woods. By seven, I was conscious of the fact that I was reading late relative to a number of kids I knew. My sister, 20 months older, was already an avid reader, and my closest friend, just three months older than me, had read to my sister’s class when we were in four-year-old nursery school. It took me a month to get through the first chapter of the book, but slowly, I improved and learned to enjoy sustained reading.

By the way, I also required speech therapy as a child. I believe that this was around first or second grade, and I remember I had to walk through my older sister’s “academically talented” classroom to get to the therapy room. I just want to note that both reading and speaking did not come easily to me, and so perhaps, there could be some inspiration found here for other aspiring novelists who never experienced writing or related skills as a gift or something to be taken for granted.

But back to my favorites, after Little House, I went on to read many different books, but I remember enjoying Matt Christopher’s sports fiction, The Hardy Boys, and all different kinds of sports biographies for kids. Judy Blume, Encyclopedia Brown, Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis, and many others came later, and then by high school, I was reading classics commonly assigned.