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For quite a long time as a child I could take it or leave it, reading. I was always good at it. What I mean is back then – don't know about schools now, whether they read at all – a schoolteacher would call on different students to read a paragraph or two from whatever text we were studying. Some classmates struggled mightily at it, mispronouncing words or getting the wrong word altogether, reading “thought” instead of “though,” reading “though” instead of “through.”
Other classmates would labor across a line of text, their voices rising . . . as . . . they . . .read . . . each . . . word . . one agonizing word at a time. The slow readers like that would sometimes reach the end of the line of text and continue on to the next line before realizing that the sentence had ended. They would then go back and read the last word of the previous line again, this time with a falling intonation, because we'd all been taught that one's voice should drop at the end of a sentence.
Taking reading or leaving it really changed for me after coming home from school one day and sitting in my father's recliner to watch television. He'd been reading The Godfather and had left the book face down on the end table by his recliner. Whatever was on television didn't interest me, I guess, because I idly picked up his book and started reading.
I got lost in the book. Just . . . lost.
I read a few pages at the point he'd left off; then I went back and started reading from the first. There was a passage in there about a bridesmaid, Sonny, and something about turning guts into macaroni that just had my hot little mind in a whirl.
My mother came out of the kitchen and passed between me and the television. She said, Wha'cha readin'?
I held up the book, showing her the cover.
She said, Hm. We'll see about that when yuhDaddy gets home.
Made my heart skip a beat, but I was already hooked on the book.
I heard him come in work at the mill, heard him walk down the hallway. Mama come flying out the kitchen and met him between me and the television.
You see what your son's been reading? she asked him in an arch voice.
What? he asked.
She turned to me.
Show him, she said.
Again I held up the book, turned the cover toward him so he could see it.
Well? Mama said.
It won't hurt him, Daddy said. Let him read.
I became a reader then because I could read what I wanted and not be restricted to what I thought I was supposed to read or had better read.
Well, within reason. Fanny Hill, that came later.
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