Perhaps you consider yourself well-read because you read a couple of books a month and once got halfway through Infinite Jest. That’s great! But 4-year-old wunderkind Daliyah Marie Arana has definitely read more books than you.
As the Washington Post reports, Daliyah read her first book on her own at 2 years and 11 months old, and has since read more than 1,000 books, including college-level texts. The preschooler’s passion for reading is so impressive, she was even invited to shadow Carla Hayden, the leader of the Library of Congress, on Wednesday as “librarian for the day.”
The little girl from Gainesville, Georgia, showed up wearing glasses, a pink dress, and a bow, looking like your average adorable child, only to wow Hayden with her passion for reading.“She just kept saying how the Library of Congress is her most favorite, favorite, favorite library in the whole wide world,” Haleema Arana, Daliyah’s mother, told the Post.
Daliyah’s mother got the idea of counting the number of books the voracious reader goes through after hearing about the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program. By 3 years old, Daliyah had already “likely” read 1,000 with the help of her mother at that point, but she’s read more than 1,000 more books in the year since, the Post notes.
The young girl’s reading level has never formally been measured, but she has read at the college level, as evidenced by this impressive video:
