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….

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.