Look
June 24th, 2007 by 
Rory Harper
Alcoholics commonly report that, unlike non-alcoholics, they have an amazingly vivid, powerful memory of their first drinking experience. They knew as it was happening to them that they were encountering something that was forever going to alter their lives. Their surroundings still glow around them, in memory. The virgin taste is strong and sweet and pure. They are transformed.
I drink little, and I only barely remember my first beer. But I remember my first word. I was six years old, in the first grade at Escuela Anaco, a small school run for the children of the Americans who worked the oilpatch in the Venezuelan highlands. The word was ‘look’, and I was rendered instantly and permanently intoxicated by the sudden realization that the black squiggles on the page meant something.
I was transformed.
–Excerpted from an essay I wrote in 1989 for the ‘Visions’ fanzine. (Yes, I’m plagiarizing my own self.)
My family moved every couple of years, and I quit trying too hard to make friends, because I’d just lose them soon. No matter where we lived, I grew up in libraries, news-stands, and bookstores. I think a lot of addictive readers suffered social isolation as children.
I would read books about everything, blitzing through uncontrolled crack-head runs with various authors and subjects. Baseball novels (don’t see those much any more), archaeology, astronomy, paleontology, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden. The Bobbsey Twins. Even the Freddie the Pig series, for Ghod’s sake.
Then the damn science fiction and fantasy books crept up on me. I read the complete L. Frank Baum Oz series, the Mushroom Planet series, the Rick Brant series, the Tom Swift, Jr. series.
I read everything I could find by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I never, never join organizations. I joined the Burroughs Bibliophiles. I still have the membership card.
I hung out at the K-G Drugstore when we lived in
Doc Smith, Andre Norton. Asimov’s Lucky Starr series.
Then I mainlined Heinlein, and was transformed again. Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke, egged on by John W. Campbell at Astounding Stories, created modern science fiction as we know it. Heinlein also created me, in many ways.
There’s no turning back after you’ve injected some pure Heinlein into your mindstream.
This research asserts that 38% of all
I have no idea how many books I’ve read, but it’s likely to be well over twenty thousand, because I used to burn through one almost daily, usually reading multiple books at a time.
I still go to the Bryan Library at least once a week and load up. I’m still addicted to words, and now I struggle with it. The internet has made it worse, almost unmanageable, because now I don’t have to go anywhere to encounter an endless stream of words.
I still remember the voluptuous, warm flavor of the word ‘look’.
I bet I’m not alone here.
Posted in Daily Life | 
13 Comments »
June 25th, 2007 at 8:40 am
I don’t remember when I learned to read–I was sight reading some before I ever got to first grade. In fact, I worried in first grade because we learned words one by one, and phonetics was so clearly bogus. (You couldn’t sound out most words, the vowels didn’t do that ‘when there are two vowels, the first one says its name and the second one is silent’ thing nearly as often as the phonetics lessons would have you believe.) I thought that reading was magic, not just memorizing words. I was already doing that.
What I remember with wonder and vividness is reading my first sf book. It was Star Rangers by Andre Norton. I couldn’t believe that this kind of book existed. And since it was an Andre Norton book, I was equally astonished that there was a whole shelf of them. It was even better than the Black Stallion books by Walter Farley.
June 25th, 2007 at 9:34 am
I vividly remember learning to read; it’s one of the few strong memories I have of early childhood (which is mostly shrouded in a forgetful fog).
My grandmother taught me to read from a photocopy of an old reader held together with a large document clip, and I remember the page-sized letters for learning the alphabet, and the columns of short words I started sounding out. There is a definite glow around those photocopied pages in my memory.
June 25th, 2007 at 11:15 am
I don’t remember my first word but I do remember my first (real) book. But I was kind of a late bloomer, reading-wise.
I was a whole-word reader in a phonics world, and while I had the tools to read, I didn’t read until I was in fourth grade, when I had a transformative moment. We had free reading class, and I was sitting there dutifully decoding The Boxcar Children…and then I stopped decoding and started flying through the book like a bat outta hell. The next class after reading was music, and it was Thursday so it was dance, and the deal was that we moved our desks against the wall and took off our shoes and socks in preparation. Somewhere after I fell headfirst into The Boxcar Children the teacher gave the signals and everyone moved their desks…except me. The teacher apparently turned the lights on and off four times before I surfaced enough to see that I was sitting at my desk in the middle of the room, all alone. I was embarrassed, but I had also found a way to access pure story, and I was hooked.
From that point, my reading went from mid-2nd grade level to adult books within six months. I’m not saying I understood everything I read, but (like Rory) I consumed words like movie-theatre popcorn or crack or some other rapidly consumed substance. You could take eight books out at the NYPL at a time, and I made two trips a week. On a good day I could rip through 2-4 books–especially when I went through my brief but fervent gothic-romance phase (all those books with women in diaphanous gowns standing in front of looming mansions? Gothics). When we moved from NYC to Massachusetts, my mother had to go in to the libraries and tell them it was okay to let me borrow books from the Adult section because I’d read my way through everything I was going to read in the kids’ section.
And the spinner racks at the drug store! My brother and I had a regular comics habit (comics arrived on Wednesdays, and my mother knew that she had to give us a lift into town to get that week’s stash) but I also had a serious paperback book habit. Mid- and down-list paperbacks were fifty cents (maybe seventy-five for the thick ones) and I bought whatever I could. SF and the aforementioned Gothics and mysteries and bestsellers. I miss spinner racks (I really miss the midlist).
But my awakening to reading has, for me, the look of a darkened room, the sense of being surrounded by my classmates, and a vague sense of embarrassment that can’t compete with the total intoxication of words.
June 25th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
I don’t remember my first word or even my first book because I HATED reading until sixth grade. I do, however, remember my first fantasy book, Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffery. I remember very vividly finding it at the school library (second shelf from the bottom,) looking at the cover, reading the blurb, opening it up… and since then I’ve read constantly.
June 25th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. Mom tells me I pretty much read spontaneously at the age of three. But I suspect she read to me a lot when I was little.
One of my great reading epiphanies came when I was eight and I realized I could READ MORE THAN ONE BOOK AT A TIME!!!!! It was a watershed moment.
The there was the moment in college when I decided I didn’t have to finish every book I read. (I was a compleatist.) That book was TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE. I blame the tumor — not mine, Heinlein’s.
It makes me kinda bummed that I don’t read as much as I use to. I read a lot online now, but not as many books.
June 25th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Similarly, I do not recall my first read word. I was mostly a playground tomboy and backwoods survivalist up until Junior High when societal conventions became more strictly imposed under adult scrutiny and peer pressure. Before that time I had no inclination to read as a leisurely pastime.
Then routinely on Thursday nights in early 1972 the parent units would drag me over to the Gordons’ ranch-style ticky-tacky box in Grand Prairie, Texas, so they could play Canasta. I had nothing in common with the Gordon kids, but Mr. Gordon had a study with wall-to-ceiling shelves full of paperbacks and partial and complete series of pulp magazines (some going as far back as the ’20s & ’30s), all of them SF/F. I’d hole up there wiling away the hours, thumbing through the volumes, settling in his Lay-Z-Boy lounger whenever something struck my fancy.
My first SF reading was the 1968 Analog installment of Harry Harrison’s “The Horse Barbarians,” the 3rd part of his The Deathworld Trilogy. I can still clearly visualize the Kelly Freas illustrations that so captivated my imagination. Then I read “The Veldt,” the first story in Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. It was a whole new day from there on out. I quickly moved on to solids, like Herbert’s Dune, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.
Mr. Gordon died sometime in the late ‘80s. I never knew what became of his collection–I’m certain his wife and kids never realized the literary gold mine they were sitting on–and he never knew the impact he made on me.
June 25th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Thanks for sharing your experiences, guys.
As I intimated, I’m not at all surprised that so many of you have vivid memories of when your addiction kicked in. Even though it may not have been exactly when you first learned to read.
Think about what we’d be like if we didn’t read so compulsively.
It’s completely changed our lives. For the better, I like to think, though sometimes I’ve wondered…
June 25th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Bill Hillman
Editor and Webmaster for the
Official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute Sites
http://www.Tarzan.com
http://www.Tarzan.org
http://www.JohnColemanBurroughs.com
http://www.BurroughsBibliophiles.com
http://www.ERBzine.com
Weekly Webzine:
http://www.ERBzine.com/mag
June 26th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Yay, Bill! Coolness.
Like I said in my post above, the BB was the first, of very few, organizations that I’ve ever joined.
Thoguh I’m not still a member, I still have a box full of old Gridley Waves and Bulletins.
I still remmber how cool it was to get to read ‘Tarzan on Mars’.
ERB didn’t do the kind of political and social commentary that Heinlein did, but his action and color and pure imagination surely helped facilitate my early reading addiction.
June 27th, 2007 at 11:07 am
ERB was a major milestone for me on my SFF journey. I first discovered the PRINCESS OF MARS series, and then TARZAN. Loved them. Was blind to the unexamined racism in TARZAN, and when I reread it as an adult, was shocked at how blatant it was.
June 28th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
That was what happened with me with ERB and with The Scarlet Pimpernel; read ‘em as an adult with my jaw dropping.
June 28th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Yep. ERB was ‘of his time’, as most writers are.
There’s also the sexism, of course. It’s been too long since I read his stuff, but I mostly rememberthe strong women either being e-e-e-evil, or nurturing and in frequent need of manly rescue.
Sometimes I wonder what blind spots in us, in our culture, will be obvious when looked at two generations later.
I know that I still struggle with certain kinds of cultural programming. I think I’ve dealt with a lot of my racism and sexism, but I still have some serious unresolved issues around religion and death….
June 28th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
….And probably a lot of other issues that are only semi-visible, at best, to me….