WHEN THE READING LIGHT WENT ON

Michael Woo, 48, former Los Angeles city councilman and mayoral candidate; now director of Los Angeles programs for the not-for-profit Local Initiatives Support Corp.

I didn’t read very much until around the fourth grade. I recall getting some gentle nudging from Ms. Shaw [a teacher at Brightwood Elementary School in Monterey Park], whose method to get me reading was to interest me in science fiction, most notably books by Robert Heinlein.

Before the science fiction period, I read comic books--Batman, Superman, all these wars between heroes. In addition to the usual trash, I remember reading Classics Illustrated and learning about things like David Copperfield through comic books. My parents tolerated it but they didn’t encourage it.

There was another side of me that started getting interested in reading speeches by people like Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King. I think I was around age 12 or 14.

I don’t think that was my idea, [but] somehow I ended up with this book of Winston Churchill speeches. I remember it very vividly. It had a purple cover and black-and-white photographs. I started getting interested in how words were used. . . .

Being a part of the leadership of my community all comes back to [appreciating] how individuals who wanted to be leaders use words to convey their thinking and persuade others to move in a common direction.

Around that time [junior high] I became really interested in writing as a consequence of getting interested in reading. For a while, around the age of 14 or 15, there was a time when I actually wanted to become a TV comedy writer.

I used to love Mad magazine, and I started to get really interested in parody and satire. That led to studying comedy on TV and wondering whether my writing skills could be applied to that.

It’s hard for me to imagine today, now that I’m 48, not being interested in books. If you were to come to my house right now, there is a stack of books around my bed. Buying books and reading books is a very big part of my life.