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Showing posts from August, 2012

Reading is a Humbling Experience

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I’ve always been a reader. The very first book I’ve read (I might have been a fourth or fifth grader) was a kid’s version of Henry Ford’s biography. Lots of black and white photos of weird-looking cars, and no mention of union-busting or Mr. Ford’s infatuation with the Nazis and rabid anti-Semitism. I then discovered the Hardy Boys , and I must have spent a good chunk of my allowance on these books, for I seem to remember entire bookshelves filled with hard-bound Hardy Boys books. Where they are now I have no idea. A happy place Then I got on to Mark Twain, then to the more “serious” authors—Victor Hugo, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and many others. My library cards have always been filled with library stamps. It got so that librarians in the schools I attended (from high school to college) would let me search  for myself the books I wanted to borrow—they got tired of searching for books that I wanted, which was often located in th