A writer, a bookseller who loves the children's section, and a mother of two adult children, Janet Brown attends to The Tiger’s Bookshelf section of the PaperTigers blog.


I grew up in a remote corner of Alaska, without electricity or a telephone, at a time when the Internet would have been considered a maniac’s wild fantasy. Anyone entering our house at night would have found everyone in our family clustered around a couple of gas-fueled lanterns in dead silence, each of us deeply immersed in a book–except for my little brother. He was usually off in a corner of the room by himself, taking his tricycle apart and putting it back together again, or playing with his collection of Matchbox trucks.

Scarred by an unsuccessful introduction to reading in the first grade, my brother had soon become embarrassed by his lack of skill in a family of bibliovores and was a resolute functional illiterate. The rest of us found this appalling as well as inexplicable and discovering a book that would make my brother a passionate reader became an overriding obsession for us all.

Not too far from our home there was a tiny library that was our family’s idea of paradise. Even my brother loved it, since it contained picture books and illustrated encyclopedias–and as it turned out, a sizable collection of Tintin books.

We were not a family of comic book readers, but when my brother came home with his first volume of Tintin, poring over the pictures and painfully puzzling out the words, it was a big day for us all. It was the moment that my brother became a reader and Tintin became a household saint. Now all of us sat near the lanterns, silently and happily reading, uninterrupted by the disruptive pleas of “Help! I need to find the crescent wrench,” or “Won’t one of you please read to me?”

Posted July 2008