[Lucio] had learnt to read at the same time as me, but I had read heaps of books and he had only read a few because he read slowly and got bored; all the same when he was at our house he used to read, because every now and then I would get tired of playing and throw myself down on the lawn with a book. Then Lucio would go and boast to my brothers that he had read a whole book, because they always teased him about reading so little. “Today I read two lira.” “Today I read five lira,” he would say proudly, showing them the price written on the flyleaf.
Natalia Ginzburg, The Things We Used to Say, tr. Judith Woolf.
Extracts 