I have no clear memory of a time when I didn’t love books.
I remember reading Green Eggs and Ham aloud, cover to cover, for my ever-patient mother in our kitchen when I was six. I remember reading Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet and The Mystery of the Green Ghost in the third grade. I remember reading all of Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys books and Lester Del Rey’s The Runaway Robot and Robert Silverberg’s Revolt on Alpha C when I was eight.
But even though all this wonderfulness totally lit a fire within me, it was another literary work that really set my feet on my life’s path. It was a gift to our family from my father, and it arrived in 1970, when I was nine.
The World Book Encyclopedia.
At the time, we lived in East Point, Georgia, where he was pastor of an Evangelical congregation. I don’t know what prompted him to shell out that kind of money – that would have been a couple hundred dollars back then, probably more than they spent on Christmas – but it may have been the fact that, as a fourth grader, I was reaching an age where I would require homework resources.
My mom was very encouraging of this. She made certain that even though the books were very expensive and sitting in our no-food-allowed, don’t-touch-anything living room, I should avail myself of them when I needed to find something out for a school assignment.
This seemed counter-intuitive to me. These books felt to the touch like the very finest bibles; the edges of their pages were gold-trimmed. I couldn’t believe I would be allowed to touch these books, let alone read them.
Well, she didn’t have to tell me twice! For that matter, she didn’t have to mention school assignments.
The physicist Richard Feynman frequently spoke of “the pleasure of finding things out”, and one of his essay collections bears that title. His premise was that learning new things for their own sake is one of life’s great joys, and I confirmed this via the WBE. A great pleasure it was; I immediately immersed myself in it, grabbing a volume off the shelf and taking it to my room, where I sat on the bed and read.
And so it went, until we moved to Crawfordsville, Indiana, where the WEB took up a place on a new shelf in a different living room. And to the edge of town, in a new house, to which they followed.
It would be romantic, of course, to claim that I read the WEB front-to-back, but that just isn’t so; I snacked on those volumes, often randomly, and probably never read a single one cover-to-cover.
But I read hundreds of articles. Hundreds. Articles about Thomas Edison; the first airplane flight; volcanoes; the Titanic; the history of England; aircraft carriers; the Civil War; the eradication of smallpox; the invention of the telephone; native American tribes; Ben Franklin; Mary Shelley; gunpowder; computers; the Plymouth colony; the interstate highway system; Mozart; rubber bands.
And... Volume S.
The one with Space.
Track down the 1970 set of WEB and you’ll be treated to several dozen pages of the US space program, from its post-WW II origins through Apollo 10. The Eagle landed after the 1970 edition had gone into the editing phase; but no matter, I’d watched the Eagle land, live on television, and had been following that event and everything NASA since the point at which WEB left off in National Geographic.
I read about Sputnik and Explorer I... the chimp test flights... Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shephard... John Glenn’s orbits... Project Gemini... the Apollo 1 fire... the first trips around the moon.
I couldn’t get enough. That volume went everywhere with me – to church, on car rides – and my parents didn’t object. I think it was a sign that the investment in the WEB had been money well-spent.
The point being – reading is the beating heart of a bookworm, but it must be understood that in this particular bookworm, learning became more important than the joy of great narrative; both fiction and non-fiction inspire.
Isaac Asimov, who would become my hero and idol, wrote bails of both; and he came to prefer writing non-fiction 10-to-1. In the decades I’ve been a writer, I’ve met a similar ratio – a ratio which also holds true in the books I buy. My home library contains 10 non-fiction books to every novel or collection.
It’s the glowing pavement of decades of path now behind me, and who knows how much path ahead – the pleasure of finding things out, which I discovered in that 1970 encyclopedia. May I never leave that path...
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