I recently wrote about an appalling situation we face in our country, the fact that so few Americans read books anymore.
I started reading before my third birthday, and it has been my favorite pastime for more than 70 years. If I have one regret, it is that there is so much great literature I haven’t read. I have read all sorts of baseball books, most of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books and all sorts of middlebrow stuff.
But there are so many wonderful writers I have all but ignored. I’ve never read “Ulysses” or “Finnegan’s Wake,” and I doubt I’ve read a dozen books that were initially published in a language other than English.
There is one book I have probably read 15-20 times, although not always all the way through. I’m sort of ashamed to say what it is.
You see, I wrote it.
Why so many times? A lot of them were looking for errors and wording that could be improved for a second printing. After that task had been completed, there were just a lot of evenings when I picked it up for a few minutes before falling asleep.
You see, as much as I love to read, my 73-year-old eyes are starting to go. A lot of my “reading” now is actually listening to audiobooks either on my iPhone or my Amazon Echo.
“Alexa, read …”
I was looking through a couple of very old books that I brought back from Virginia last year when we sorted through things in my late mother’s house. One was an edition of Jane Porter’s “Scottish Chiefs,” a book originally published in 1809. The edition I have came out about a hundred years ago and is inscribed “To Wesley from Mother.”
Wesley was my father, who left us before my third birthday, while Mother was my grandmother Blanche, who died the year before I was born. I read the book when I was very young and maybe I’ll look at it again.
The other book is a high-school textbook from the 1930s. It’s an anthology called “Adventure,” covering everything from poetry and short stories to Shakespeare and Stevenson.
It even has the first poem I ever remember knowing.
A short, silly one.
“I never saw a purple cow,
“I never hope to see one;
“But I can tell you, anyhow,
“I’d rather see than be one.”
When I wrote earlier about the lack of reading in our country, I was writing about illiteracy as a problem.
This is different.
Reading has been such a wonderful pleasure for me, and I truly feel sorry for people who never learned that same pleasure.
Reading isn’t just fundamental.
It’s fun.