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My earliest reading memory

The first adult book I ever read was The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. I was seven years old, and my father started reading it to me and my siblings at bedtime. He read to us every night, whatever book he was reading for himself, and it was usually fantasy or science fiction. I got so caught up in the story of The Sword of Shannara that I couldn't bear the slow pace of one chapter per night. I started sneaking into my father's closet (where he kept his personal bookshelf) and reading ahead. Somehow, I had it in my mind that I would get in trouble for cheating this way, so I didn't use a bookmark, I just wrote the page number down on a piece of scrap paper. It didn't occur to me that a 300,000 word novel wasn't meant for a seven-year-old. Maybe part of the excitement was thinking I was on an illicit adventure, but I discovered that the epic stories are in the thick books with no pictures. After that, I never stopped reading them.