Confessions of a Bookie
I have certain peculiarities about books. I still have every book I’ve owned (I think; I’ve been through a lot of books). To give away, to sell, or even to loan a book I have read is unthinkable: I’d as soon run naked through a public park—books are the most intimate of possessions. And out of respect for others and their bookish idiosyncrasies, I never borrow a book. Too, I have trouble accepting a used book as a gift because it has been someone’s personal, and therefore intimate, possession.
I have enjoyed as far back as I can remember. I read school assignments, the Dallas Times Herald (an afternoon paper, now defunct, for which I had a paper route), the Reader’s Digest, and popular magazines— Time, Look, Life and the Saturday Evening Post. Reading books for pleasure took hold later—it required quiet and a settled environment, something in short supply in our turmoil-filled home. It was love of reading that led to the episode “A Trip to the Principal’s Office.” Unlike some who have a love affair with books my interest didn’t begin until I was in medical school.
Dad’s death in 1957 changed everything, including my reading habits. Tension vanished overnight and I was reborn as much as anyone can be. The following year my Rice grades leaped, I landed on the Dean’s List, and was admitted to UT Southwestern Medical School, where I flourished. During my sophomore year I began to read books for pleasure. I dispensed with the Ex Libris labels and developed the habit of signing my name on the frontispiece, a practice that quickly expanded to include the date, and later the time and place I was when I finished. Over the years it has evolved into a sentence or two encompassing my thoughts about the book or the setting. To thumb through my books is to revisit my reading, my travels, my life.
I’ve said many times that medical school was the easiest thing I ever did and the most fun. Studying involved a lot of reading and I luxuriated in it. Reading was the purest form of pleasure and stuff just stuck in my head in a way I’d not before experienced. By the summer of 1960, before my junior year was to begin, I had overcome my insecurities enough to branch out from purely medical topics and began to read other things. Among the first was Russian author Boris Pasternak’s novel, Dr. Zhivago, which reached the West in 1957 and earned him the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. It was an international sensation, particularly because of the secretive nature of Russian society at the time and the tensions of the Cold War.
Dr. Zhivago only whetted my appetite for more. The next one I recall reading was William Shirer’s epic history of Nazi Germany, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, a 1200+ page tome that I read in the summer of 1961 between my junior and senior years, much of it on a trip to Colorado with my new girlfriend, Marianne Harper. That in turn stimulated me to read Winston Churchill’s six volume “World War II” and his four volume “History of the English Speaking Peoples” during my senior year.
A few years ago inventoried my collection, including the frontispiece inscriptions and some notes added with the perspective gained in the intervening years, and transferred the information to a list (Paging Through Life) arranged by title in sequential order. In turn this led to the “Reading” entry in my annual Christmas letter. It has proved satisfying because I hear from friends who have read some of the books I mention.
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