Beverly Cleary, age 90

Beverly Cleary, the author who gave the spunky, irrepressible Ramona Quimby to generations of children, turns 90 today. Chances are she will already have dropped everything and read by the time she celebrates with a family dinner at her son's house, because she drops everything and reads every day.

To help children acquire that habit, the National Education Association -- along with the National Parent Teacher Association, HarperCollins Children's Books, the American Library Association, and Reading Rockets -- is sponsoring a national Drop Everything and Read Day in honor of Cleary's birthday. Ramona -- who, as Cleary wrote in ''Ramona Quimby, Age 8," ''decided that she preferred Sustained Silent Reading to DEAR because it sounded more grown-up" -- is mascot of the day.

Reached last week at her home on California's Monterey Peninsula, Cleary wasn't feeling any older than 80. She was 83 when ''Ramona's World," her last book, was published. More than a half century ago, when Cleary was a children's librarian in Portland, Ore., a boy complained of having nothing good to read. So Cleary wrote ''Henry Huggins," which was published in 1950 and introduced readers to a third-grader whose ''hair looked like a scrubbing brush" and who had a dog named Ribsy that he painted pink.

Over the next five decades, Cleary wrote 39 books about the funny, achingly real lives of everyday boys and girls living in a quiet, everyday neighborhood. Though Cleary sounded her age when she recently told an interviewer that she'd enjoy dinner with any of the characters she created ''if they chewed with their mouths shut and sat up straight and minded their manners," the secret to her books is that she never left her own childhood far behind.

''It was a long time ago, but I remember it vividly," she says. ''I had a standard neighborhood childhood. The children all burst out of the house after supper and played games. There were hopscotch squares in front of almost every house, and we jumped rope."

She was ''something like" the well-behaved Ellen Tebbits of her imagination. ''But inside I was a bit like Ramona," she says. ''I thought of things to do but I didn't do them."

BEVERLY CLEARY READS ALOUD Watch a video of Cleary reading at www.boston.com/ae/books.

First grade, Cleary recalls, was ''absolutely the worst year of my whole life." Not only did she contract chicken pox, smallpox, and tonsillitis, but ''school in those days was grim." The Portland of her childhood offered no kindergarten, and classes had 40 students. ''The teacher had to literally whip us into shape," Cleary says. ''She whipped my hands with a little bamboo-tipped pointer once, and I didn't really understand why. I was really frightened. My mother had to shove me out the door every morning. In second grade I had a lovely, understanding teacher."

Her writing days, Cleary insists, are over.

''I don't have the energy I used to have," she says. ''I think of things, but I never enjoyed the actual act of putting words on paper. What I enjoy doing is revising. Getting the first draft down is painful. Then I just love to tear it to pieces."

Cleary just finished reading a book about the writing of the Nancy Drew mysteries that she never read. Neither had she read her own books -- to herself or her two children or three grandchildren -- until she recently read the eight Ramona books in preparation for a movie being developed by Fox films.

''I was pleasantly surprised," Cleary says. ''I had forgotten some of the things I put in. And I found them very amusing."

IRENE SEGE