WHY I READ

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In the classes I offer at the university where I teach, on the first day I always ask the students what they read. Primarily I want to know what genre(s) they choose, but I also want to know if they have a favorite author. Some students don’t remember the author, but they remember the main character or the series, like Katniss or The Hunger Games.

I’m going to start asking WHY they read. During one of my classes this semester, I talked to the students about WHY I read as a kid, and I filled them in on some of my background.

My father was a strange man. With the way he insisted on keeping us close to home, some people probably thought he was just overprotective. I grew up in the 1960s. The world was in a lot of turmoil with the Vietnam War and people here on the home front torn over whether the United States should even be involved. There were also lots of concerns about the Space Race and the Cold War. I grew up during a time when many people built fallout shelters in their backyards.

An overprotective nature would have explained why my father never allowed us to go anywhere, but it didn’t explain why he was always willing to leave the family. In the middle of second grade while I was living in Lawton, my father moved us out of the house in the middle of the night. We left so many things behind, including a handful of comics I was able to wheedle out of my parents.

They were twelve cents apiece back then, and there was no tax on anything less than a dollar, so for a begged-for quarter, I could buy two issues of whatever I wanted and a piece of gum from the gumball machine posted at the door of the IGA store where my parents shopped. I hated to limit my choices among all those brightly colored heroes.

I was six and seven while we lived there, 1963 and 1964, which meant that was rollout time for Marvel Comics. I got the early issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, and The Avengers, but I read a lot of DC Comics too. I loved Superboy, especially when the stories featured the Legion of Super-Heroes. I also leaned into Green Lantern and The Atom because they were science fiction based. Later I found out that pulp writers from the old science fiction magazines wrote a number of those. I also read the early issues of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents with art by Wally Wood.

I raised myself on literary greatness that neither my parents nor my younger brothers ever understood. I wanted to believe in heroes who could stand up against adversity and be who they wanted to be.

I never understood that choice in reading material till I got older and figured out how different my life was from the “normal” that everyone was supposed to be living.

When my father pulled up sticks in the middle of the night and dropped us at my granny’s house in Ada while he went on to Oklahoma City to run a gas station, I lost all those things and ended up sleeping on a couch with my brother. How I didn’t get the mumps when he did, I’ll never understand.

We lived with my granny during tense times. My mother and father didn’t talk so much, and my granny was aggravated with my mother a lot for reasons I didn’t understand. I figured out later that it was because my granny didn’t know we were coming in the middle of the night either.

Granny lived by herself in a yellow shotgun house and worked at Wickham’s Packing Plant in Ada. Wickham’s was just a three-block walk down the street. Granny packed her lunch every day, and she usually brought home wienies for us. We would go out to meet her and walk her home.

After a few months, we moved to Oklahoma City to join my father in a trailer house on a hill behind the gas station. Our freedom was limited. My father was afraid of hippies and social unrest. On our arrival there, there was a street marker not far from the gas station where the previous station manager had been shot and killed.

I thought that was more dangerous and couldn’t quite figure out all the things going through my father’s head. During that time, my father went out to bars and came in late. He wasn’t at home to make sure we were protected. There were also a lot of late-night arguments between my parents that sometimes woke me up.

There was a lot I didn’t understand, and it seemed like the world just kept changing. I stayed with comic books when I could get them, but I read all the books in Miss Knight’s third grade class library. Mythologies, histories, adventure books, I devoured all of those because it was easier for me to be by myself than to hang out with kids who had known each other for a couple years or more.

That was also the time I discovered that I was ADHD. No one had a name for that back then, but Miss Knight would ask me to stop bothering people when I was done with my work. She said I needed to finish my work. It was done. She said I needed to check my work. I insisted it was correct. When she checked it, she found the work was complete and correct. She suggested I read books from the class library. I told them I’d read them. She grilled me on some of them, but I had read them, and I remembered them.

Then she did something that changed my life forever: she brought in a big box of Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, Cherry Ames, and others. Miss Knight told me when I was finished with my work, I could read, and if I was good, I could take them home and continue reading. I dug in and plowed through them.

By the way, worst day to not do good in class was Friday. If I didn’t get to take the book home, Frank and Joe hung on the cliff all weekend, or Nancy was trapped in miserable circumstances while searching for clues.

While I attended Pleasant Hill Elementary School, I read constantly. And I wrote my first stories about Buzzy Bear and Raky Raccoon. I even wrote one where many of my classmates became the superheroes I read and dreamed out. One girl’s mom even typed the story up and it was read in class.

At that point, I was just considered even more strange than people had thought. I didn’t care. I loved the stories, and they gave me more freedom than I found at school or at home.

We lived in OKC for three years, then my father moved us to Seminole. We again lived in a trailer house within a baseball throw of the new station. That was when the Space Race was heating up. My father came in one morning to announce that Bobby Kennedy had been shot and killed. I didn’t know who he was, though I did remember John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Cartoons were taken off television, and the funeral was broadcast.

That was also when my mother took me to the library. I only got to go once every two weeks, and I could only check out five books at a time. Two days after checking those five books out, I’d finished them and wanted to go back. My mother told me I shouldn’t have read them so fast, and that I could re-read them. That didn’t make sense to me because I already knew what had happened.

I increased my writing during those long summers. Even with three younger brothers, no one shared my interest in reading or writing. I wrote stories about characters I'd read about, and characters of my own that were dropped onto other planets or into magical realms.

I read mainly science fiction, Robert A. Heinlein, Andre Norton, and dozens of others, because the moon landing was on everybody’s mind, and I also wanted to know more about what lay beyond my small world. When I wasn’t reading, I explored as much as I could with my brothers. We caught snakes, horned toads, and crawdads, and we built traps for rabbits and coyotes. We climbed trees and found squirrels and raccoons in their nests, and we were lucky we didn’t get clawed, bitten, or infected with rabies.

I read a lot of fantasy too. By that time, I’d discovered Pearl’s Swap Shop in Seminole. I could talk my mother into going there every now and then when I had a dollar. Used paperbacks were a dime and used comics were a nickel. I found Robert E. Howard and Conan the Barbarian. Conan wasn’t far removed from the superhero world. After Howard, I found Lin Carter and more fantasy authors, though they were few and you had to know what you were looking for.

I read because I wanted a larger world. In fact, I wanted a whole host of worlds. During that time, television news was rolling the names of the soldiers killed in the Vietnam War every night, but none of my parents or kids at school talked about it much. I was pretty much convinced I would reach eighteen years of age, get drafted, then get shipped off and shot.

Life looked pretty bleak, and things at home continued to get stressed. My father was home more, but he was still gone a lot. One night he came home intoxicated and tore down the Christmas tree that December. After that, my mother told me he had to drink beer because of his “high blood pressure.”

There were too many secrets and too many problems at home to have deep conversation about life and where I fit in it. I went to school and came home, not really happy in either of those lives. Between those times, I read everything I could get my hands on, and I wrote.

When I got into high school, I discovered mysteries and private eyes. I read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who were good, but the California environments and time periods were too far removed from what I knew to fill in the areas I was curious about. Then I found Rex Stout, who gave readers the incredible Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

I realized I wanted to be like Archie: witty, tough, and trustworthy. Those things fit the superhero mold I’d already built for myself. That wasn’t working out because I discovered I wasn’t a mutant, couldn’t find a radioactive spider (or anything really, because I was desperate), and really was, sadly, from Earth and not some other planet so I would have powers. I had a bow for a while, but making trick arrows like Green Arrow and Hawkeye was way beyond my skill level. I got a boomerang and thought I could do crime fighting, but one busted window later, that career was over.

But a private eye, who was a man of honor and a good man to have as a friend, that was surely within my reach. I kept reading comics and fantasy and science fiction to make my world bigger, and to gain knowledge. I learned from a Flash comic that the world is roughly eight thousand miles in diameter. When I reached Algebra in ninth grade and learned about Pi, I figured out that the world was roughly twenty-four thousand miles around.

Comics and math were a solid combination.

Batman helped me with my private detective knowledge. Once he gave up the weird years when he fought with space aliens.

I read a lot of mystery and suspense to get a better view of the world I was living in. Especially when the draft was ended, and I realized I was going to live longer than I’d thought. The mysteries and suspense gave me deeper insight into how people acted. Unfortunately, I was delving into adult action, not junior high and high school students. My own age group became an even larger enigma to me because they and their behavior didn’t make sense to me. I grew more distant from that group and remained so throughout college.

After reading those private eye novels, I understood a lot more of my parents’ problems. When I was twenty-two, my father finally stepped away from the family for years. That hurt, but the pain was blunted by the fact that I was married, and I was determined to be there for my mother.

I tend to be solitary by nature. I love my wife and my kids, and my “small” world is a LOT larger than the one I grew up in.

My reading motivation stays the same: I want to learn. When I read fiction, I pick up techniques and tools that I like, and I discover market. When I read nonfiction, it’s because I’m curious and want to know more about a person, a particular science, a thing, or a time period. I also re-read old favorites, even though I know how they’re going to end, to return to a happy time in my life.

I know why I read: I read so that I can be me.