How many books does it take to be considered "well-read?" I'll go to my grave, considering myself just the opposite. Part of it is because, even after fighting that dragon for more than fifty years, it's still a struggle for me to read any book, to keep my eye on the page rather than focusing on the flicker of a light bulb filament or the legs of a moth as my ADHD demands, frustrated by trying to arrange the words and letters on the page that my dyslexia jokingly rearranges.
I surround myself with people who make me envious of the books they've read. People like Catherine, who taught generations of young scholars to read Greek, or Brent, who nearly killed us all by demanding we read a new play every week and turn in a card on it, or Suzanne, who quietly sat with Miss Eudora all those years and soaked in all the magic she gave out.
I used to go to Oxford to try and catch a glimpse of Larry Brown. In a time when most people who like letters were looking for the more elaborate Barry Hannah, I was fascinated by this quiet fireman who ate one book after another in his firehouse, then settled down and wrote dozens of stories and two novels before deciding to show them to anyone.
My father wanted me to settle in and become part of the community of businessmen who provided jobs and helped build their community, like his father and his father's father, but all I wanted was to at least sit with the people of letters, even though I never dreamed of being one of them, at least not to where I'd admit it to anyone.
How many books does it take to be considered "well-read?" I have a bucket list that's quite long. Plays, novels, collections of stories. An awful lot of the science fiction I love so much comes in the form of stories because that was how you published them in the years when science fiction grew out of a few nineteenth-century novels into what it is today.
I'll never finish the bucket list. That's part of the point of having a bucket list. I'm a boy who loves to read, born an imperfect and fettered reader. I suppose that's for the best. If my reading weren't fettered and restrained, considering the sheer volume of books I'd like to read one day, you'd probably never see me again. I'd be sitting under a tree, surviving off the fruit it drops, and reading my books.
