La mia biblioteca
Living in a one bedroom-apartment, I limit myself to owning 1300 books and 750 vinyl record albums. My collection of both is heavily weighted to my own college years. As e-books improve, I add titles that way; and fortunately, I live only two blocks from a good library. I'm slowly replacing my classics (e.g., Darwin's Origin of Species) with e-books, but I've always been a re-reader, and when I attach to a series, I want "real" books, so they'll be right there, in order, when I re-read them. From Mama I inherited a love of "detective fiction"; from Daddy I inherited a fondness for "science fiction," beginning with Asimov's Second Foundation, because we were away from home and that was what Daddy had lying around. I won't be collecting Asimov. After Daddy died, I kept his Van Voght collection because I WILL re-read IT. I've read the first six Dune novels three times: first as each was published; then in 1986, when, coincidentally, my two best friends were also reading them (for a week we were all Reverend Mothers and all household items were future technology); then during the Gulf War I read them a third time, because I found them so prescient. I've avoided the sequels as fervently as I usually avoid Sherlock Holmes sequels, but recently several Sherlock sequels, most notably Laurie King's, have invaded my resolve. I have far more cookbooks and gardening books than I need, and a startlingly eclectic esoteric/occult collection. I will continue to add to this library but maintain the same limit on the number of physical books I own, or I'll have nowhere to sleep.
Informazione su di me
My mother taught me to read during the month after my fifth birthday (the textbook, Teach Me To Read, had 31 lessons) because she was tired of having to spell the words I was trying to write in my own stories. I read my first adult novel (serialized, in six parts, in the Saturday Evening Post) before I started school. Teachers quickly learned to send me to the school library when I'd finished work in class. When I was ten and my mother was pregnant with my sister, the librarians at Little Rock's main library were pleased to "babysit" me in the children's section when Mama had to visit her OB-GYN. By eleven, I'd exhausted the children's section and wandered upstairs, from which I procured a book called The Divine Comedy. "What are you reading?" Daddy asked. When I told him, he exclaimed, "You can't understand that!" "But I'm reading all the footnotes," I protested. He repeated his denial. Disheartened, I returned the book, unfinished; I was halfway through the Purgatorio. Of course I always read all my school books the first week of class. That I should become a literature and writing professor was inevitable, I guess, but when I had declared my dissertation topic, Howard Nemerov pulled a Daddy on me. "Just stay away from all that Hermetic stuff." he advised me when he understood that I planned to write about Blake. Unfortunately, the Hermetic stuff was what I grasped intuitively. My advisor exacerbated the situation by remarking that I might write the definitive work on Blake's long poem "Jerusalem." No one told me that the best dissertation was a finished dissertation. Years went by before other people wrote the background I needed to approach Blake differently, and by then I'd enjoyed a long career teaching in a prestigious university, and all my original professors had passed on, so I was "let go" in favor of someone who HAD just finished a dissertation. I'm a good writer and an excellent editor, but (despite reading many books of advice) I have no idea how to construct a plot. If I ever figure it out, I'll write novels (my first love). In the meantime, I read a lot.
Luogo
University City, MO, USA
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