Enlightening story of reader
MANY writers will cite a local library, librarian or kind teacher as the source and inspiration for their life-long love of books.
So it is with Ramona Koval, writer, journalist and broadcaster who presented ABC Radio National’s The Book Show for 16 years between 1995 and 2011.
Ramona shares her earliest childhood memories, reading classics that many of us delighted in; Enid Blyton’s Noddy Goes to Toyland and The Little Red Hen in the Golden Books series.
Thanks to the Camberwell Mobile Library, in something of a quantum leap, she soon graduated to Kafka, Kerouac and Koestler, thus as she says, losing her literary innocence. Then came Colette, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. So began a lifelong love of reading and deriving inspiration from writers worldwide.
She explains how and why some authors and their stories have had such an impact on her life.
Koval nowadays connects to the digital age and reads Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to her grandchildren from her iPad, their little fingers sweeping along the screen to turn the pages; she and they still transfixed by the wonder of storytelling.
The ease of digital access suits her but bookshops and bookshelves are still a lure and ultimately the books that surround Koval are those she grew up with and formed her; a refuge in a busy world.
This is an intriguing and enlightening part-autobiography intertwined with Koval’s world of books and how each influenced the other.