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I'm happy to announce that my children's picture book, Humberto the Bookworm Hamster, has been nominated for an EPIC Award.

EPIC stands for the "Electronically Published Internet Coalition."

The winner of EPIC’s 2011 Children's Non-Fiction/Fiction Category will be announced at the annual conference, held in historical Williamsburg, Virginia, March 10-13, 2011.

You can find more details at http://www.epicon-conference.com.

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 loved books, as long as they were read to him, and I loved reading aloud, except when it cut into my own reading time. Often when my parents, my sisters, and I were all silently reading, my brother would be off in a corner alone, taking his tricycle apart and putting it back together or interrupting us with requests that one of us read to him for a while.

Scarred by an unsuccessful introduction to reading in the first grade, my brother had soon became 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 away 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 we all–even my little brother– were to be found clustered around the lanterns, blissfully engrossed in our books without being disturbed by “Won’t you read to me now,” or “Help me find the big crescent wrench, somebody” coming from a distant corner of the room.

As a bookseller, I love to find books for the uneasy reader and Tintin is always high on my list of suggestions. A colleague of mine specializes in turning reluctant readers into bookworms and in an upcoming interview she will tell us how she does it. What about you? What titles do you suggest for the uneasy readers of your acquaintance? Let us know!