During Christmas vacation, I not only read blogs, e-mails and tweets, I read books:

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Matched by Ally Condie
• A Blunt Instrument by Georgette Heyer
• The New Capitalist Manifesto by Umair Haque
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

All were good, some were great.  But that's not what I'm grateful for.  Well I am, but even more fundamentally, I am grateful that I can read.  That I can see to read, and that I know how to read.

Do you remember when you read your first words (mine were Run with Dick and Jane)?  I was four.  I also remember being eight, sitting in the car, and realizing that I could decipher billboards and street signs.  My world had expanded, as if by magic.

I can read.

How did you feel when you realized you understood what words meant?

How would your life be different if you couldn't read?