...about me and books
This is a meme going around Live Journal and it's a great one so I figure I'll take a stab at it.
1. I learned to read when my brother went to kindergarten, which meant I could already read when I went to kindergarten. I went to kindergarten in the Masonic Temple because the school was too crowded and kids had to sleep in the hallway for nap time because the Masonic Temple was too crowded too. Eventually, they sent me to a psychologist, who I disliked intensely but when he asked me if I was uncomfortable I told him no, I was hungry and it was lunch time and I was missing lunch, which apparently cued him to the fact that not only could I read, but I could tell time too and they skipped me up to first grade.
2. In my family the prevailing wisdom is that you can learn anything from books. My father and my uncle when they were (I have no idea how old, but let's say early twenties) decided that they could learn to butcher a steer with a book from the library. I have no memory of how this story turns out, but since it's one my dad used to tell a lot, I presume they actually managed to do it--though I have no idea what kind of shape the book was when they returned it to the library.
3. My whole family reads (or did when we were younger, I'm not sure whether a couple of my brothers read all that much now). Our idea of a really great Sunday afternoon would be for everyone to be curled up somewhere reading a book (if we were at my grandmother's it also involved watching Elvis Presley movies). You can never go wrong in my family by giving someone a book as a gift (unless it's one they already own).
4. I have no idea what the first book I ever read was, though we once owned a Dick and Jane-ish book which consisted only of the word 'Oh' repeated as appropriate throughout the book.
Page 1: Oh!
Page 2: Oh, oh!
Page 3: Oh! Oh! Oh!
Page 4: Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
Page 5: Oh.
5. When my sister was about three, she memorized one of the Dr. Suess books (I can't for the life of me remember which one), which she would 'read' to the babysitter when she came. The babysitter had no idea what to make of this.
6. My father read us a story every night. My mother would read to us when my father wasn't there, but we really preferred him although my mother put more emotion into the stories and read the dialogue as if it was actually dialogue. My father just read in a metronomic monotone. It was great.
7. My brother once lived in a small-ish town with a used bookstore. The store had two portable racks of paperback books they put outside the front door after they closed at night in case anyone had a book emergency at two o'clock in the morning.
8. Our local library when I was a kid was very small (I didn't think this at the time, but, really, it was tiny). They had a limit on how many books you could take out as a kid (somewhere between 7 and 10) but if we wanted more, we just gave them to my mother to sign out. My mother, who thought The Wonderful World of Disney was suspiciously violent for children to watch, believed that kids should read any book they thought they were ready for. The only books I remember reading too soon (aside from books that just turned out to be really boring) were Hawaii by James Michener, where I got as far as the bashing in heads scene right at the beginning of the book and A Town Called Alice by Nevile Shute where it was the crucifixtion scene that did me in. I'm pretty sure I was in sixth grade when I read both those books and the school librarian was the one who gave me A Town Called Alice.
9. My grandmother bought books by the bag full, especially romance novels and mysteries. She had this little room off her living room that was floor to ceiling filled with books. My sister and I would bring home a bag of books every time we went there. She had a basket full of books by the front door and would press them on you when you left, along with twenty dollar bills and giant molasses cookies. She also had a book of Shirley Jackson stories, The Magic of Shirley Jackson, that you would see right when you walked into her living room. When she died and my brother asked me what I wanted from the house, I told him that book because it feels like my grandmother to me.
10. When I was in graduate school I lived for a year in a big old house in the country with a bunch of other people. The house belonged to some nameless, faceless professor and was filled with bookshelves filled with books. The bookshelves all had books two deep on every shelf which, for some reason, I found fascinating. At our house, we stacked books and put them in baskets and stored them in paper bags, but we never double-upped books on bookshelves.
11. Books are my addiction. Other people shop for shoes or technology toys. I had a student tell me once that he can never go into Best Buy without buying something. That's how Border's is for me, I told him. I have tons of books I haven't even read but I can't stop buying books. Occasionally I declare a book buying sabbatical but it never lasts as long as I say it will.
12. When I go away, even if it's just overnight, I rarely take fewer than four books with me. I have to have one fiction and one non-fiction (for when I get tired of reading one or the other) and then I have to have a backup book for each--because not every town has emergency book buying contingencies (see number 7). When I go, like, to a cabin for a week or someplace else relaxing, I take a whole bag of books and I start collecting them several months in advance and setting them aside so I don't accidently read them some day and ruin the whole vacation. Right before I leave I have to be careful about what books I start reading and when. It's no good taking a half-finished book on vacation because it's taking up good space a whole unstarted book could be packed in.
13. I love owning books. It's one of the greatest things about being an adult with my own money. I remember where books are by their shape and color and position on the book shelf and can almost always go right to the book even if I haven't looked at it in a long time. I can only remember where books are when they're out on bookshelves or in stacks though. Once I pack them away in boxes, I have no idea where they are and I have to go through every single box to find them.
14. Unlike many people I did not start writing when I was young. I made up stories a lot but it was enough just to store them in my head. I used to always try to sit by the window on the school bus so I could stare out the window and daydream the whole ride. My brothers and sister and I did occasionally write plays which we performed on the front porch for my mother and our neighbor down the road. It didn't actually occur to me to be a writer until graduate school when I learned (and, yes, i know this sounds goofy) that it was actually possible to revise things and make them better. Up until then--and this includes all the way through undergraduate college--I figured that what you put down on paper was what you had, with occasional corrections of spelling and grammar.
15. The best presents I ever receive are books that I didn't know existed or didn't know I wanted or hadn't thought of getting.
