I have lived a long life and looking back, I am amazed by how much time I have spent reading. I am not a pilot who keeps an annotated log book. But I must have devoted tens of thousands of hours to the written word in forms ranging from the Bible to Rogue Magazine.
Perhaps my reflections on becoming a reader will stimulate your own.
I don't remember learning to read, but I know that I could read -- a bit -- before I entered school. Reading became important to me because I could do it alone. This would have been on the trapline, Lake Minchumina.
My parents were readers, and after we moved to Fairbanks, they filled our houses with books. I still have some of them. Woody Guthrie's autobiography "Bound For Glory" is one -- smoke-damaged in 1952 by the fire that made our first Fairbanks house uninhabitable.
I wasn't reading Woody in 1952. More like children's books. The My Book House series, containing stories, myths and poems, I returned to again and again. The series was boldly illustrated. You not only read about King Midas. You saw him in bright colors. Old King Cole, too. Culturally, I was at a disadvantage. My Book House was written for the urban middle class, not a kid on the banks of the Chena River. I also read comics, including the Classics versions of "A Tale of Two Cities," "Oliver Twist" and "The Prisoner of Zenda."
The house fire of '52 had a serious impact not only on my family life but my reading habits. Housing was tight during the Korean War, and my parents split up. My dad took a construction job out of town. The money he made he saved to buy a new house. My mother, my sister and I would live with her brothers in New York City, the Bronx. The split lasted 16 months.
New York was a reader's paradise. There were so many libraries, and my mother brought home bags of children's books from rummage sales. By 1953, I had developed the pattern I followed through high school. Serious reading took place at home, not school, because at home I picked the books and read as I pleased.
More influential than the books were the newspapers adults brought through the door of 2815 Sedgwick Avenue. I could barely read The New York Times or the Herald Tribune, but the tabloids, The Daily News and The Daily Mirror, were intoxicating.
The tabs must have set their reading level for readers with some high school, but I waded into them. I loved the giant front-page photos of disasters, the equally large sports photos on the back page, the screaming headlines and the endless variety of human activity on display. The raw vitality of urban life was a wonder.
The tabloids taught me to think metaphorically. The blonde "bombshell" in the bikini was not going to be stuffed into a cannon. "Wise guys" were not the three kings of Christmas fame but mobsters "rubbed out" by enemies who did not use erasers. A tabloid reader had to master nicknames: "Ike," our beloved president; "Joe," the leader of the evil Soviet Union; and "Preacher Roe," the Brooklyn Dodger star left-hander (who was not a preacher.) The sports page was awash in metaphors and similes: pitchers "twirled," boxers took "dives," divers "aced" their entry into the water, halfbacks "ran like a man possessed."
My reading ability was far more advanced than my pronunciation. The Kremlin was full of intrigue, which I pronounced "intergoo." Millionaire Tommy Manville engaged in an orgy with several chorus girls. What's an "org-ee"? I had the good sense not to ask my mother.
Some tab stories completely mystified me. Christine Jorgensen went to Denmark for a sex change. What?
After we returned to Fairbanks in July 1954, I started reading books written specifically for teens. The Hardy Boys -- the whole series. The war novels of Joseph A. Altsheler (still in print) featuring boys in the Civil War and World War I. Then on to Huckleberry Finn, which I read four or five times before I realized it was more than a boys' adventure story.
My parents' bookcases got a working over. I was especially drawn to books about people subjected to extreme suffering -- the Donner Party, Sir John Franklin, whalers locked in the Arctic ice winter and summer. I clearly remember an account of a French postman who discovered an entire family face down at the dinner table after mom, dad and the kids ate poisonous mushrooms.
At 16, I began reading Jack Kerouac. This inevitably led to Allen Ginsberg and other Beats as well as Norman Mailer. The blurbs on the Beats' book covers described them as "wild," "crazy," "mad," "restlessly racing ... in a frantic search for Kicks -- and Truth." Just imagine a 16-year-old climbing the stairs to his room to read "On the Road" after plodding through "Silas Marner" in study hall. Sal Paradise saying to Dean Moriarty, "Where we going man?" and Dean replying, "I don't know but we gotta go" put my adolescent restlessness into unforgettable words. Norman Mailer's columns in the Village Voice offered urbanity to a teen in the sticks as well as an important message that stayed with me. Kid, there is more to the world than your town, your family and your school -- don't accept what you are given as the rest of your life.
Pornography occasionally circulated among the boys I knew. The girlie magazines were tame by today's measure, even Playboy, and the men's magazines carried stories even a teenager figured were phony. Come on, were American fliers shot down over North Korea really tortured by Red Chinese nymphomaniacs? The Marquis de Sade was available in cheap, poorly-printed editions, but the Marquis' rages against God wore me out. Obviously there were better things to do with teenage virgins in chains than lecture them on the perfidy of God. At 16, I could not know that a few years later I would be selling pornography in a large chain bookstore, mostly Grove Press Victorian memoirs and novels: "My Secret Life," "A Man With a Maid," "The Lusty Turk." The sale of porno was illegal in Boston in 1967. The store owner provided the employees with instructions about how to behave if the law walked in.
At 18, I left Fairbanks for a college in New York state. I was apprehensive about failing. I did not realize that all those books and newspapers, written by men and women of great ability and no ability at all, had prepared me for my future as an adult reader.
Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch News columnist.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com or click here to submit via any web browser.