Why I've Been Reading

a break from our regularly scheduled programming

I read a lot of novels growing up. There was a big bookshelf in one room of the house where my parents kept the books they had finished reading, and I remember sitting on the floor staring at the spines, and working my way through them. They were heavy on Robertson Davies and Evelyn Waugh, so I read all of those, plus some Murdochs, Bellows, Doctorows, and many more I don’t remember.

For my 8th grade graduation (lol), my parents gave me “luxe” editions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Great Expectations. I put them on my own, smaller bookshelf and tried, several times, to read them, but couldn’t get into them, and I stared at those spines for years feeling a failure. Still, in high school and wanting my reading to signal something, I worked through other classics. The longer the more impressive, so I read Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch. There was now a vague list in my head, and I was checking items off.