Art & Creativity Quote by Caroline B. Cooney

Cooney is doing something slyly radical here: she’s celebrating “conversion stories” without shaming the unconverted. The setup is almost confessional - readers admit they’ve “always hated reading” - and she treats that not as a moral failure but as a mismatch of experience and access. The punchline is modest and strategic: they “actually finished” a book. Not “became scholars,” not “found themselves,” just finished. In a culture where reading is often sold as virtue, Cooney frames it as a practical pleasure, closer to discovering a show you can’t stop bingeing than earning a gold star.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of how institutions package books. If someone can be pushed through years of schooling and still “hate reading,” the problem isn’t only attention spans; it’s the way reading gets linked to homework, gatekeeping, and status anxiety. Cooney’s work - widely read YA, thriller-leaning, plot-forward - functions like an on-ramp. Her pride isn’t in being the destination; it’s in being the bridge to “another book.” That’s an author choosing ecosystem over ego.

“I’m thrilled” lands as more than politeness. It’s the ethos of a children’s/YA writer who understands that taste precedes literacy-as-identity. The final line - “figured out that reading is fun” - is deliberately plain, almost childlike, and that’s the point: it strips away cultural pieties and returns reading to its most persuasive argument, the one that actually recruits new readers.