Today and tomorrow's Fresh Air with Teri Gross is a Tribute to Spalding Gray. [link]

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This explains so much.

I have so little in terms of a sense of entitlement.

Please allow me that.

All I want is your books and your celebrity crushes.

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The only trouble I got into with books growing up was that I read them to the exclusion of doing other things that needed to be done.

(raises hand) OH yes. Books were so much more interesting to me than my own dull life, after all.

I offer you a cute story from my early childhood: at the age of 3 or so (before I had learned how to read, mind you), my favorite toy was a big heavy Sears catalog. I would pore over it for hours... and then I would follow my parents around the house telling them long stories about what I'd been reading. I sure wish they'd transcribed some of that, because details are long forgotten.

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I like Calli's dad.

There were books in the house when I was growing up, but they were mostly castoffs from other members of my grandparents's generation. I read them anyway (hey, it was printed matter), but was never able to discuss them with my parents.

When my father visited last August, we built bookcases. He stopped by on his way out of town and was astonished to find them already full, with me shifting one of the smaller cases into Kenny's room so he could get some of his books off the floor. If my father had bothered to read any of the spines, it's likely he would have disowned me on the spot.

At my grandfather's funeral, I spent much of my free time talking with my great-aunt's daughter, a teacher who'd done volunteer conservation work at a library in Virginia. She's the same age as my mother, tried to get pregnant about the same time. I keep thinking "Maybe there is more to the Mistaken Zygote Theory than anyone's letting on."

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My parents were very encouraging when it came to reading (they have a library with over 40,000 books). I finished every book in my school by the time I was in 4th grade. Everything from Nancy Drew to Laura Ingalls Wilder. I would have read books from my parents' library, but their books consisted of textbooks and research material and documentation and factual histories. Not interesting to a 9 year-old.

So, I found my mom's hidden stash of romance novels. Not the itty bitty harlequins, but the monstrous +600 pages of true love and adventure. Inevitably, my father would take the books away. I would wait about an hour before I would sneak it back to my room. I think it was mostly a half-hearted protest on my father's part because he never bothered hiding them when he would take them away from me and he would never take the same book twice. By the time I was 12, I was working in a used bookstore and had access to any book I wanted.

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Serial Posting (that is what it is called, right?)

[The professor] says, "Oh, I wouldn't know. I'VE NEVER READ TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD."

I've never read it either. It just happened to be a book that wasn't available at my grade school. I skipped a grade in English in HS, which happened to be the grade that TKaMB is required, and by college, they sort of expect you to have read it. I was a teacher's assistant for an English class that read it and had to (grammatically) grade papers on a book I hadn't even read, so now I was/am familiar enough with the book to have no desire of reading it in my spare time.

I had a strict Creationist as my Biology teacher...

I had a strict Evolutionist, except he didn't believe in microevolution, which I found odd...

I DID get in constant trouble for reading in a poor position...

I would read in the car at night. Everyone warned me I was going to ruin my eyes. I'm the only one in my family who does not need glasses. Not sure if it is or is not related.

I actually think I would have been fine moving ahead, but my older brother had been accelerated in some subjects and did not adjust well at all.

I spent my senior year in HS being a TA and having study hall every period (I had meet all requirements by junior year and could have actually probably graduated my sophomore year) because my mom had graduated a year early and she thought it was the worst thing she could have done, so she wouldn't let me graduate early.

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All I want is your books and your celebrity crushes.

Eh, I have your kitchen. I guess it's fair.

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I expended much of my mental energy in childhood to the effort to get enough books. My mother would only take me to the library every two weeks, and you could only check out seven books at a time. We had school library period once a week, where I could get two books. That wasn't enough books. I read all of the Hardy Boys et al because my friends had them. I read my parents odd assortment of outdated best-sellers such as Keys to the Kingdom and Forever Amber. The first sex scene in a book that I remember was in The Carpetbaggers, which I found abandoned somewhere. When those resources were exhausted, I was driven to stories about Christian martyrs in the church library and reading the encyclopedia.

eta: Skyzy, stop what you're doing. Right now. Go get To Kill a Mockingbird.

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I was driven to stories about Christian martyrs in the church library and reading the encyclopedia.

I loved reading the encyclopedia growing up. We had two.

My parents weren't readers, though. My across-the-street neighbor taught me to read, and I learned to make friends with librarians. Ms. Smelzel was the best - she'd let me check out three books at a time even though two was the limit. Then I found the one used bookstore within biking distance. Paperbacks at half the price of their cover, so you'd look for the earlier editions that sold for 60 cents back in 1962. That's where I read my pulpy science fiction and fantasy: Fritz Leiber, REH, ERB.

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Thanks to everyone that recommended reading Crusie's Welcome to Temptation! Seriously a wonderful and hilarious read. (I foolishly believed that since I had already read Faking It, that reading Temptation out of sequence would be annoying.)

This is why I'm not allowed to live in my head anymore.

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