Books and More Books, Never Enough
I am genetically blessed with a good memory. I was born with it and I've done absolutely nothing special to cultivate it, other than to stuff it full of facts that I can pull out during games of Trivial Pursuit or at random times to surprise Wonder Woman. My mother saved a book she bought for me as a toddler that was a directory of horse breeds: Percheron, Clydesdale, Morgan - I memorized them all and family legend says I would "read" the book to visiting adults as a party trick.
Books were important to my parents. I've been surrounded by books my whole life. My mother still has the set of encyclopedias that she and my dad bought in 1970, along with a collection of classics like Gulliver's Travels and Pilgrim's Progress, books I challenged during elementary school. I was allowed to read anything I could get my hands on, including the horrific Charles Manson true crime best seller from the 1970s, Helter Skelter, which I read when I was 11 and scarred myself for life. If my mother thought a book would be good for me, she would "suggest" strongly that I try it. I usually acquiesced, but I remember her chasing me around the house with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, reading it aloud until I finally took it from her and devoured it myself. She has good taste, Mom does.
We always got books for Christmas and as birthday presents. I loved baseball history as a kid and I still remember the names of the baseball books I got one Christmas which included the classic, The Boys of Summer by Roger Angell about the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s. One of Mom's friends gave me a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein, a problematic book today, but still a seminal 20th century novel that sparked a love for science fiction in me that has never dissipated. I read every single Heinlein book and all of the other well known authors from the golden age of science fiction: Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury and more.
I practically bunked at the local library whenever we lived close enough for me to ride my bike to one. My siblings and I made such good friends with the staff of one county library that the they remembered us years after we'd moved away. We also visited used book stores regularly. My brother and I built a comic book collection together using money from paper routes, picking up glass bottles, aluminum cans and any other methods we could come up with to add one twenty-five cent edition of Action and Detective comics at the time to a hoard that eventually numbered into the hundreds.
As an adult, I carried Steven King novels into the field in my Army rucksack, reading Pet Semetary and Firestarter on late night radio watches in the late 80s at Ft.Hood, TX (now Ft. Cavazos). I became obsessed with one detective and police procedural series after another, including most memorably the 55 books of the 87th Precinct series by Ed McBain written between 1956 and 2005. I have also been partial to the true-crime books and novels of former Los Angeles police sergeant Joseph Wambaugh.
In my late 30s I was somewhat radicalized by reading A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn and Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen which caused me to reexamine American history and society as it had been presented to me in school and in the mainstream media. I started reading more radical literature like Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and The Hammer and the Hoe by Robin D. G. Kelley about Communist organizers in 1940s Alabama working with sharecroppers for better wages and working conditions. My favorite biography of all time is Woodie Guthrie, a Life by Joe Klein about the remarkable and radical life of the influential songwriter and musician.
These days I have stacks of books in my house waiting for me to read them. I'll get around to them all at some point. but by then, I'll probably have many more stacked around them also waiting to be read. I have never let the presence of unread books dissuade me from buying even more. I like choices, you know?
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