Formative Events

This is the second of an intended series of posts on the formative events in my life. Search for “formative events” to see all of them.

It’s hard for me to overstate the importance of the role that reading has played in shaping my life. I don’t remember exactly how and when I learned to read, or gained reading skills, but I do know this: I learned to read proficiently, with an adult-level vocabulary, years earlier than the other kids I grew up and went to school with.

Certainly part of the reason for my early reading skills was simply practice (more on that in a moment). But I know there was something else at work as well: I was a painfully introverted little kid, and books were a comfortable, certain, and accessible escape for me. Early in my reading I had the ability to completely lose myself in the book I was reading. If it was a fiction book, my whole world became the world in the book; if it was a non-fiction book, I got totally focused on the subject at hand (no matter what it was!). The scary and hurtful real world was gone. I was in another place for so long as I could read without interruption. It was (and still is!) almost another state of being for me. In my youth, this alternate reality was a much better reality than (most especially) school, and I was mightily attracted to it. When I read about addiction, some of the symptoms resonate with me — I think some might classify me as a “reading addict"…

But practice was also important, and while I can’t remember it precisely, it must have been practice that got me the reading skills that first allowed me to get into that other place. Our home — despite being on a farm, with a lower-than-average disposable income — was a rich source of reading material. Our livingroom had a large built-in floor-to-ceiling set of bookshelves packed with books, and we had a set of overflow bookshelves in our cellar — hundreds, perhaps thousands of books. And I devoured them all. I mean that last bit quite literally: I read every single book in our house — even an encyclopedia — cover-to-cover, and sometimes multiple times. My parents had some books hidden away, presumably because of their adult content, but I found all those, too (sorry, mom <smile>). I remember my frustration, at something like 12 or 13 years old, that I could find no more fresh reading material at home. Fortunately that’s about the same time I discovered lending libraries, and they became the source for my reading “fixes”.

Some of those books at home still stand out in my memory. The encyclopedia has a special status, for it was my introduction to the idea that one could acquire new knowledge by reading. It was also my introduction to the very notion that knowledge had been organized, and that there were named areas of knowledge (history, botany, mechanics, physics, etc.) that could be further explored. It may sound silly now, but for me at the time that was a huge revelation — I was so naive that I simply had no idea this was the case. My parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and we had hundreds of them on our bookshelves. Each of these books was a hard-cover volume of some 300 or 400 pages, with a “condensed” version of (on average) about five novels in each volume. Today I wouldn’t dream of picking up one of those things, for fear that the novelist’s art had been rudely trashed. But imagine what it was like for me as a kid, romping through hundreds of novels, in a form that was highly digestible for someone with a short attention span. By the time I was about 10 or 11, I could easily read an entire volume in an evening — a rate of five novels a day. We could have a debate about the quality of that experience, but you certainly couldn’t argue with the breadth of exposure it gave me. Those volumes introduced me to dozens and dozens of authors whose work I have enjoyed my whole life. Finally, there was a collection of books that my family inherited (my fuzzy memory says from my dad’s side) — kids books from the late 1800s and early 1900s. These were simply marvelous, and a nearly-endless source of pleasure for me: books like the Uncle Wiggly series, the Wizard of Oz series, and so on. Many had gorgeous color “plates” that I can still remember. I loved these books, reading each of them many times.

Somewhere along the line, certainly by the time I got to high school (Steinert High School in Hamiltion Township, NJ — alma mater of Sam Alito, our newest Supreme Court Justice — and no, I didn’t know him; I did know his sister Rosemary, who was in my class), I realized that I was reading a lot more than most kids were — and that I what I read, I read much faster. This was brought home to me in a way that was both exciting (because I got some recognition, a rare thing for me at school) and extraordinarily uncomfortable (recognition and introversion don’t mix well). I can’t recall the exact details, but sometime in my senior year there was an awards ceremony. The entire senior class was gathered in the auditorium, and one by one names of students who had excelled in some fashion were called to receive their public congratulations and a certificate. I remember sitting in the audience watching this as the select few of my fellow students were called up: highest grades, most improved, sports heroes, etc. Then I heard my name called — and I cannot convey in words just how profoundly shocking that was. I couldn’t imagine what I could possibly be recognized for — certainly not my grades, which were mediocre. I had gotten very high scores on SATs and the National Merit Scholarship, but there was nothing unique about that in our very large high school — several other students had equivalently high scores. And that agonizing walk to the stage, and up onto it — I can still recall the introverted pain of that march to my doom. When I got to the podium where our principal was handing out the awards, he started blathering about my “special” award, one they’d never done before, to recognize an achievement they’d never anticipated: I had checked out vastly more books from the school library than any student had ever done before. I don’t remember the numbers any more, but I do remember the principal saying that the number was 8 times my nearest competition. I knew that I read a lot, but I really didn’t realize that my reading volume was anything remotely like that exceptional. The librarian (one of my few adult friends), it turns out, had lobbied for this recognition. She also was the only person who knew that not only had I checked those books out, but I had read them — she often quizzed me about them, and even occasionally read one on my recommendation. She knew I’d read every last one of those books.

Two categories of those high-school books stand out for me: science fiction (in general), and Isaac Asimov’s incredibly wide-ranging series of non-fiction books on science and technology. The science fiction (and fantasy) became, for many years, my favorite escape mechanism. Isaac Asimov wrote science fiction, but he also wrote hundreds of non-fiction books, many of them aimed at young people. He had a special talent for making science and technology understandable — and fascinating — for me. Once I discovered them in our library, I read all the volumes we had, and then lobbied our librarian to get more. She’d either buy them, or borrow them from other libraries, just for me — in fact, this collaboration of ours on Isaac Asimov’s books, when I was in the tenth grade, was the beginning of my friendship with her — and that friendship was very important to me (and a couple of other social rejects) in high school, as she and her library were my refuge from the many ugly experiences I had in school. To my shame I cannot remember her name, but I remember her, and very fondly.

Well, this certainly turned into a long post!

That’s the story of the beginning of my lifelong reading habit. It hasn’t stopped or even slowed down; not at any point in my life. For example, when stationed on a ship in the Navy, I read the entire contents of its rather small library. Of course <smile>. And I read more now than I ever have, though much of my reading is now online. But I still read several print books every week, between 8 and 10 on average. I tend to go on binges — fiction for a few weeks, non-fiction in a particular subject area for a few weeks. Currently I’m on a political and history binge, reading everything I can get my hands on about the war on terror (there’s a surprising amount of good material out there already)…