Books on the floor, books on the stove, books . . .

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Since roughly age 11, I've had an incorrigible attraction to books. My father's Heritage Club selections; my mother's hardback Harper mysteries. In my teenage years, the first thing I bought with my first paycheck, for running various errands around New York City on my first big-time summer job, for American Oil Company, in 1957, was, of course, a book: The Wapshot Chronicle, the recently-published, award-winning novel by The New Yorker magazine's John Cheever. Of course, I had a devil of a time understanding its true meaning, but I was mighty proud that I'd read it at all. And I'd paid for it with my own money.

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