Reading

I've been doing a lot of reading lately. Reading, and listening to books. I am always working on a book. I have been since I was about ten.

It took me a long time to learn how to read. I'm not dislexic, but I had a difficult time remembering letters and putting words together. This is going to sound stupid, but the word that took me the longest to learn was "a." I just couldn't get that the letter "a" was also a word. Everytime I would come upon it in "a" sentence I would stop in my tracks, puzzled, befuddled, and frustrated. Somehere in the third grade I got passed it.

I didn't take to books right away after learning to read. I think it took me another year. I remember the first non-picture book I ever read. It was called The Lighthouse. I loved it. It was the first time I had chosen a book by myself, without pictures, and I got lost in it. In that small book (author unremembered) I found out I could transport myself into another reality, far from the one I lived in.

I'd like to say that I became a zealous reader of the finest literature offered to children. But I didn't. After The Lighthouse and a book called The Good Bad Boy, I read what is know as "pulp fiction." One SummerI stayed with my cousin Maryann for a few weeks. While there I raided my mother's old books from her youth, which had been inherited by Maryann. They were a set of blue hard cover books with aged brown pages printed in the 1930's. I forget how many there were, more than a dozen, and they were a goldmine to me. The books were Nancy Drew mysteries mostly, with some Deanna Durbin's thrown in. I read them one after another, in the sequence in which they had been published, loving every one of them. By the time I found Nancy Drew, the author, Carolyn Keene, had written many more in the series. I hunted them down, begging my mother to buy them for me as rewards, or birthday or Christmas gifts. I went through them all, and the Deana Durbin's and the Hardy Boys mysteries.

The first adult novel I ever read was a thick, old hard covered copy of Gone With The Wind. It was one of the books my mother had, but never read. This old copy was printed on thick paper, each page containing two columns of text. I took this book with me when I went to stay with my Aunt Pat one summer. She was pregnant with her fourth child and my mother thought it would be better for me to help out my aunt then to be home on the streets in NYC. I didn't mind. I loved my Aunt Pat. I loved being with her. She was funny, and accepting, and respectful to me. She encouraged me to read the book when I was intimidated by its size. I dove in and devoured it. That began my love affair with long, detailed stories, and historical fiction. I read that novel every Summer for the next dozen years or so. it became a ritual I engaged in to celebrate my love of reading.

Over the years I moved from fiction to non-fiction, and in the past twenty years have read maybe one novel per year. I indulged my interest in biographies, American history, religion, philosophy and art. It wasn't until the paperback publication of The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy, that I found an author and a character, Jack Ryan, that I wanted more of. Clancy publishes a new one every 18 - 24 months, and I sign up for them immediately at the library.

sometime last year I took out a CD version of The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith from the library. I loved it and listened to all six books while on my drives to the outer counties or S. FL. While on vacation in North Carolina this past November I picked up a mystery called The Death Artist by Jonathan Santlofer. I enjoyed it and decided to visit the library to see if there were any Jesse Stone mysteries by Robert B. Parker at the library. I had been introduced to the character Jesse Stone via a tv movie starring a favorite of mine, Tom Selleck. I found that there were four Jesse Stone novels and I gobbled them up. I started reading and listening to Parker's other mysteries and have gone through at least a dozen and a half of them.

After reading non-fiction for twenty years it is an absolute delight to read recreationally again. I don't care that its pulp fiction. I don't care that the the books are meaningless, or that I don't remember the titles. I don't care that I am spending my time and not learning anything significant. I'm just enjoying being transported to a different reality, just like I was when I fell in love with reading some forty-five years ago.