[Prestidigitweeze]

Here's the missing option I'd have checked:

My parents approved of my crazy addiction to books.

Our family consisted entirely of bibliophagists and the evidence strained our bookshelves. An English and music teacher in public high schools, my mother favored the Canon from Chaucer to Robinson Jeffers. My father preferred experimental and contemporary fiction and often read crime and spy novels as well. I didn't appreciate his taste until the age of fourteen, when I realized he was responsible for our books by Genet, John Dos Passos, Faulkner, Blaise Cendrars, J. P. Donleavy, John Rechy and Raymond Chandler. My mother considered the noir novels he left in the bathroom to be trash. I believed her until the day I actually read one.

Since my brothers and sister were much older than I and had already left the house when I was young, it isn't clear which books on the shelves used to be theirs. Our textbook on clinical psychology had to have been my sister's; one or both of my brothers must have been responsible for the stack of vintage science fiction paperbacks in our den (one of which was an Ace double by Philip K. Dick). I used to enjoy reading interviews with schizophrenics in my sister's textbook because the interviewees seemed involuntarily creative.

It was only when I stayed up after midnight that my mother sometimes appeared in my doorway to insist that I switch off the gooseneck lamp attached to my headboard. But even then, she worried about my insomnia and not my reading.