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During my third grade year of elementary school I read 25 books for a literacy program contest in order to get a certificate from the Governor of Oklahoma.
The reading bug had bitten. By the time I was in 5th grade I had read Ben Hur, The Robe and Dumas� The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo,
as well several other novels that were not the usual fare of elementary school children. It was common during junior high and high school for me to read
60-80 novels or more, during a calendar year, sometime at the rate of two or more a week. During my college and military days, that slowed considerably
as I had less free time, but even today, I easily get through 22-30 or more novels in a year�s time. I have nineteen new ones waiting on my iPad, as I write this.
And yes, I have read such classics as Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Moby-Dick, Catcher in the Rye, Great Expectations,
A Tale of Two Cities, Call of the Wild, Lolita, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hamlet, The Grapes of Wrath, Don Quixote, To Kill A Mockingbird,
various works by Jane Austen, J. R.Tolkien, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore. Cooper, T. S. Elliott, and many such others as one needs to complete
high school and college English and American Literature and World Literature course requirements. Others, I read just to see what all the buzz was about,
as well as other classic works in their original French and German, for my Modern Languages French degree and minor in German. I enjoyed most of those
classics, but not as much as those in my favorites list above. I do read some non-fiction, usually related to writing itself, quantum physics, or
comparative mythology and religion, but fiction is like candy for me. |
