I was an early reader, resulting in part from long periods indoors during illness and harsh Chicago winters. My mother made me a bibliophile; she patiently read with me for hours and I eventually made sense on my own of those mysterious marks on the page.

Muncus Agruncus was a book I found in the library when I was in kindergarten. Its distinctive illustrations accompanied a tale told in rhyming couplets.

The book begins with lines I've never forgotten - ''Muncus Agruncus, a bad little mouse/Came up through the pantry in somebody's house …'' - and goes on to tell a story calculated to appeal to children, with the rascally rodent having a wonderful time - playing dress-ups, sailing in the bathtub, making a mess in the kitchen - and getting away with it.

I don't know why my parents decided I should record it, but they did, and I made a cassette tape.

I had a cold at the time, so after almost every couplet, I would cough, and there were occasional words I would mangle, but it wasn't a bad effort. It wasn't just a rote run-through - I could read with some personality and inflection, savouring a word such as ''vanilla'' (heavy emphasis on that middle syllable) and employing a bit of dramatic flair, although sometimes my intonation was off - one line came out: ''He did, and he threw his red socks. In!''

It was just a bit of fun, something to listen to occasionally, although for some reason we never bought the book.

More recently, when my sister had children, we wanted to introduce Muncus Agruncus to them. It's been out of print for decades and apparently a lot of people remember it fondly. Copies available online are exorbitantly priced (some well into the hundreds of dollars), but eventually we found one that was affordable and sprang for it. Two, in fact.

It's still as much fun as I remember, and my niece and nephew love it, too. As for that cassette, it's somewhere at my mother's house. Next time I go back there I will have to find it and transfer it to a digital medium. I just hope it isn't too late.