to read

somehow i just picked it up by looking over my mother's shoulder as she read to my brother, who was just one year older; this was prior to school age. so it was awhile before i came to anything there that i didn't already know.
i started going to the branch library regularly. i got tired of kid's books pretty early because for me they ended too soon. so i started on the adult science fiction--at the beginning of the alphabet. by sometime in jr. high, i had read all of these. but after that i had found particular interests & i read more & more nonfiction & started going to the central library downtown. i'd come out with a huge stack of books i could barely manage, & by the time i got home i'd have read half of one.
i remember the year they introduced a sort of color-coded ranked reading system where you read a text & then answered questions about it. i went through the whole thing in a single day. this was the time when they figured i could read about 1200 words per minute (i wouldn't read anywhere near that today: i like the sounds of words too much).
the thing i regret most about adulthood is i have so little time anymore for that kind of voracious reading. now i just buy books i might like & it can take a couple of years before i get around to opening them. in college i would sit on the floor between the stacks & read a book in a few hours if i found one i liked. these days i still try to get into one big book every year (last summer it was War and Peace). i'm about 3 Pynchons behind...