Both my reading and writing habits started out under the horror genre, after the first Nancy Drew Mysteries and the Hardy Boys, that is, which immediately followed the Golden Books, Aesop’s Fables, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and some poetry books that showed up under the Christmas tree since I was able to read. From there came a short dry spell as elementary school at that time did not promote reading other than English Grammar and history and geography texts, and Nancy and the boys held me until high school.
From there my interest was fired up by my Freshman English Teacher, Mrs. Virginia Baltay, who brought literature into our lives by bringing in a box of books that we dug into and read on our own and swapped and shared until the last day of class when we were each allowed to take our favorite for keepsies. I chose Rebecca, by Daphne DuMaurier. But, I immediately procured a copy of Wuthering Heights, and sought Edgar’s work in a $30 (hey, that was a lot at the time!) compendium of his full works. Mrs. Baltay was about as nuts about Poe as I soon became. In class, we read Franny and Zoey, Catcher in the Rye, The Iliad and The Odessey, Moby Dick, and a number of others over the next few years.
On my own, I had abandoned Nancy Drew for a large number of other detective stories, read some romance, and science fiction, starting with Orwell’s 1984, through The Time Machine, and the like. Other interests went towards Lawrence of Arabia, Portnoy’s Complaint, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc. Detective stories gave way to true crime, nonfiction, and a taste for horror was satisfied by Stephen King. Somewhere in there as well were books on psychic phenomenon as I went through that trend, as well as Joy of Sex and Joy of Cooking.
There were many, many more of course, but for a while I admit I just lapped up the horror and crime paperbacks, with Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Flies, Story of O, and Watership Down interspersed among them. Being reintroduced to some of the greats via college courses that taught me how to read beyond entertainment and escape, I’ve managed to reacqaint and meet several more authors. Still, there are so many that I can’t believe I haven’t yet gotten to and need to read: Faulkner, Rushdie, Woolfe, another Hemingway, Austen, Vonnegut, and on and on; the novels only in conjunction with a reading list meant to enlighten and expand my perception of the world, and that’s a few years’ worth as well.
Unfortunately, life bogs us down with realities that demand time. Oddly too, while I spend so much of my time on the computer and would have easy enough access to at least some of the works I seek, I prefer to hold that material book in my hands and settle into the corner of the couch in the welcoming silence of the early morning hours. I think what I should be taking advantage of is the library; the deadline of returning the books within a two-week period, the cost of zilch, the ready access as well as the mind-boggling fun of looking through a display that entices like the smell of a bakery on a Sunday morning, would do me good.
This may be one of my New Year’s resolutions; to grow intellectually and both explore and mellow. Besides, of course, the resolution to simply survive.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology