Editor’s Note: “Life Stories” is a monthly column devoted to books and reading. Ardeana Hamlin lives and writes in Hampden and works at BookMarc’s in Bangor.

The pleasures of reading came to me easily and gently, carried on the sound of my mother’s voice reading aloud. It was the late 1940s and ’50s in Bingham. Television was only a snowy screen framed by a square wooden box displayed uptown in the window of Bushey & Sterling’s store. The nearest radio station, WABI, was 70 miles away in Bangor.

Sometimes, at noon, on the old Philco, we’d hear through the static George Hale introducing the “RFD Dinner Bell” show. Unlike radio and the miracle of television, books did not require equipment to entertain us. They were the equipment.

The first book I ever owned was “The Fuzzy Wuzzy Puppy” by Florence Sarah Winship and I have it still. It is a story-poem about a little dog named Jimmy whose ears are too big for the rest of him. Poor Jimmy. His long fuzzy ears gather burrs and make it difficult for him to run. His ears have to be tied up with a red ribbon when he eats to keep them from dragging in the dish. His friends laugh at him and he feels very sad and alone.

The illustrations in the book delighted my eyes and Jimmy’s ears, covered in a fuzzy material, satisfied my need to touch what my eyes saw. Be patient, the story taught me; sometimes a problem takes care of itself.

My mother reading aloud meant being snug under her arm, my younger sister snug under the other, and my older brother sitting close in a chair beside us. My mother’s voice, the warmth of her body, and our closeness as a group established within me a sense of comfort and companionship I associate with books and reading.

Besides the daily newspaper which he read before supper sitting at the kitchen table, my father read only magazines – Argosy, Field and Stream, Sports Afield, and True. And this reading he did in bed. Often, as a little girl, I would cuddle down beside him as he read. I liked to look at the magazine pictures of hunting dogs and men in leather boots carrying rifles, of wild turkeys and deer, of ducks swimming on the calm surface of a lake, of monster rainbow trout leaping from a wild river.

My father held the magazine in his left hand, the pages turned back on themselves. Whenever he turned a page, with his right hand, the paper made a lovely swishy sound. Next to hearing my mother read aloud, watching my father read was my idea of heaven and lying in bed with a book became another pleasure I connected to reading.

What a shock it was to go to school and discover that in order to learn to read all by myself I had to toil in a dreaded phonics workbook and stumble through the mundane actions of Dick and Jane, Spot and Puff, and Mother and Father. See Spot go. Spot, I was appalled to find, did not have fuzzy wuzzy ears. And the straight-backed chair I was obliged to sit in had nothing of comfort in it.

Always strong-minded with a fierce sense of self-determination, I flatly refused to learn to read and there was nothing Miss Cook, my teacher, could do about it. My mother, wisely, decided it was time to introduce me to the Bingham Union Library, situated in an old white house on Main Street. The rooms on the north side contained the book collection, including one full of children’s books. The rooms on the south side were the home of the librarian, Mrs. Jordan, a woman who, along with her cat, presided there until after I graduated from high school.

It was common to smell beans or gingerbread baking when I went to the library. The delicious smell of baking mingled with book smells added to my growing sense that maybe I wanted to learn to read, after all. At the library, I discovered I was allowed to borrow a stack of books every Saturday. My mother read them to me even though I continued to resist learning to read. When she was too busy, I looked at the pictures and made up my own stories to tell my sister.

One day, like magic, thanks no doubt to Miss Cook’s skill as a teacher, I recognized a word, then another, and all of a sudden when I watched my father read I could point to a word and say, “deer.” And he would say, “Yup”, point to another one, maybe a long word, like “retriever” and help me sound it out. At last, the pleasure of reading “The Fuzzy Wuzzy Puppy” all by myself was mine.

At the Bingham library I discovered a copy of “Little Black Sambo.” Of all the books I borrowed, it was the one I loved most and borrowed over and over. Talk about a problem needing to be solved! In the story, a little boy is bamboozled out of his umbrella, coat and shoes by wily tigers who really want to make him their lunch. But he has the intelligence to trick them into chasing one another around and around until they turn into butter. The idea of a child using the power of his mind to outwit something large and dangerous thrilled me.

This book, I am glad to say, was reprinted several years ago as “The Tale of Little Baba Ji,” minus the racist content and illustrations. From “Little Black Sambo,” I discovered the delight of ideas – yet another pleasure of reading.

My mother loved reading movie magazines: Photoplay and Modern Screen. She read True Confessions and other romance magazines, too. When we children came home from school at noon for lunch, she encouraged us to read while we ate our sandwiches. She read her movie magazines. We children read our comic books, including Classics Illustrated, or sometimes, Jack and Jill magazine.

Eventually, as my reading skills grew, I read, while eating my lunch, the two books my mother owned: “Mrs. Mike” by Benedict and Nancy Freedman and “Nine Mile Bridge” by Helen Hamlin. To this very day, when I eat lunch, I read, a most agreeable habit.

When we returned to school in the afternoon, teachers read aloud for the first half-hour, a natural extension of my mother’s voice reading aloud. In fourth grade, Mrs. Matheson read “Stuart Little” and “Charlotte’s Web” aloud. In fifth grade, Mrs. Stuart spent the entire year reading “The Happy Hollister” books aloud. And in seventh grade, Mrs. Moore read to us Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s “The Yearling.”

For me, the message was clear – reading was interesting, exciting and full of wonder. Books and the thoughts and ideas they contained transported me to other worlds, into other minds, and helped me discover places within myself I did not know existed.

My teachers’ practice of reading aloud did not stop when I reached high school. Mrs. Hannay read Wordsworth’s poetry and Shakespeare’s plays aloud. Mr. Matheson read aloud, with great oratory style, the Preamble to the Constitution. And Mr. Caulkins read aloud geometry theorems, large ideas encoded in an economy of words.

As a student, I was expected to read aloud, too, sometimes in Latin and French. In that way, the page and the spoken word became inextricably entwined. Written language read aloud is kin to spoken language never written on a page. I speak, therefore I read. I read and I discover the pleasure of speaking my own stories.

As a teen-ager, I read a book a week, sometimes a book a day. My tastes and curiosity allowed me to read whatever took my fancy. I read literature and nonfiction of all kinds, but I preferred popular fiction by authors who told a good, fast-moving story. I still do. Elswyth Thane’s Williamsburg novels, Anne Marie Selinko’s “Desiree,” and Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” were among my favorites. The main characters in these books are strong women who grapple with the obstacles of low birth, plain looks, and social constraint. They are transformed by the events in the story, suffer joy and sorrow, and grow to self-knowledge and wisdom.

I loved to imagine myself riding down the rhododendron-edged road on my way to Manderley, Max de Winter at my side. Here then, was the infinite pleasure of identifying with fictional characters.

Now, years later, it is still possible for me to find my name, written in the early ’60s, on borrowers’ cards in certain books still on the shelves of my hometown library. Revisiting, literally, books from my past, is one more joy connected to reading.

William Penn said in his “Advice to His Children,” in 1699: “Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.” I respectfully disagree.

To my sons and my grandson, Cody, I say: Much reading is an illumination of the mind and ignites the human imagination, which is the reason it gives so many of us contentment and pleasure.