![]() It appeals to all the senses and uses them to transport readers into a story where they meet characters whose journeys they share. I say experience rather than read because I have come to believe that a good book brings the reader into an experiential space of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. In the years that followed, I have tasted, swallowed, and digested more books than I can remember but not nearly as many as I would have liked to experience. Graduate school was a blur of textbooks, journal articles, and a few memorable gems like Alexander Luria’s “The Mind of a Mnemonist,” Jerome Frank’s “Persuasion and Healing” and, on the recommendation of a classmate, the lyrical writing of naturalist, Loren Eisley. College added more Latin and British classics and introduced me to poetry and the works of James Joyce. High school brought the classics of English literature, and Latin gave me Julius Caesar, Virgil, and Cicero. For a while, I asked for and got a copy of the “World Almanac” every Christmas where I collected what would later be called trivia – lists of the longest rivers, biggest cities, and tallest buildings the world over. The question niggled me each time I rode the bus from my New Jersey home to Manhattan, scanning the tile walls of the tunnel for the first signs of dripping water. ![]() I remember turning first to the chapter on the construction of the Lincoln tunnel under the Hudson River to learn how such a seemingly impossible thing could be done. Another book, “Men in Sandals,” gave me a glimpse of the life of a monk, which like many of my friends, I once considered.Īt home, there were copies of Readers Digest, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped,” and a thick so-called wonder book of everything that explained how things were made. I found my sources in our little town library where the shelves also beckoned with all 38 volumes of the Hardy Boys novels that told the story of three brothers who helped their private-eye father solve crimes.Ī science fiction novel scared me with its description of a machine capable of reading people’s thoughts, some of which I preferred to keep to myself even as a boy of 11 or 12. I subscribed to Sky & Telescope magazine where I marveled at the photos of the night sky, used its star charts to find the observing highlights of the month and labored through articles on the physics that held the universe together. Field guides to the heavens showed me where to find Venus and Mars, the brightest stars, the constellations and rarer sights like double stars, clusters, and wisps of cosmic dust and gas where fainter stars were being born or dying. Soon I was reading everything I could find about astronomy. In one of those circles, Saturn with its perfect rings floated across my field of view as the Earth where I stood carried me under the planet’s shining orb. What we could see of that sky was limited by the streetlights and air pollution of the small factory town where I lived, but a friend with a telescope taught me how to search out small circles of sky where clarity and silence prevailed. “Stars” drew my attention to the night sky and my imagination to the faraway worlds of the dark side of the moon, the canals on Mars and the giant outer planets of the solar system. She was always an easy mark for books, just as long as I didn’t grow up to be “bookish,” by which I think she meant a person with more book knowledge than common sense. A few years after that, I noticed in our grocery store carousel a colorful book with the simple title, “Stars,” and asked my mother to buy it. I could read and recite the answers to questions about who made me and why, and what I had to do in this life to be happy with God in the next. By the time I was in second grade and because I attended a Catholic grammar school, I could read the Baltimore Catechism, a question-and-answer guide to all the theology a seven-year-old would ever need to know.
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