When I was five, my mother read Animal Farm to me for bedtime. I don't know exactly how much I understood of what she read, but I have a distinct memory of crying when the pig Napoleon chased my favorite character, Snowball, off of the farm. I also remember crying when Boxer the horse died. Later, as an adult, I read Animal Farm to my three-year-old daughter. I don't know exactly how much she understood, but she was attentive the whole time and watched her Daddy weep again when Boxer died. A few days ago, I randomly began to sing "Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland, beasts of every land and clime, hearken to my joyful tidings of the golden future time" aloud in the kitchen. The text tells us the tune should be sung to "O My Darling Clementine." My daughter, now six, joined me at "Beasts of Ireland" and continued from memory to sing with me to the end of the verse.
I read a lot of horror fiction as a child and teenager. My Aunt Carrie claims that she came upon me, when I was eight years old, reading Stephen King's Cujo. I read a lot of Stephen King and Dean Koontz for many years thereafter. When I was 10, my Uncle Richard gave me The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe for Christmas. Everyone told me that Poe wrote scary stories. So I tried to read him, but found that I couldn't understand the words or get into the stories. Some of the pictures in the margins intrigued me, but, for a time, I shelved Poe. From time to time, I would pull Poe off the shelf and try to read him, but I always found him to be too difficult. But Poe didn't go away. I heard about him constantly. A book by Stephen King called Danse Macabre tipped me off to just how large Poe's influence was in the horror genre. I saw "Poe pictures" from time to time on TV. As a teenager, I continued to pull Poe off of the shelf. I still pull him off the shelf every Halloween or so. I recently read Arthur Gordon Pym for the first time. I read Pit and the Pendulum and The Black Cat to my children last Halloween. I've been through many of the short stories more times than I can count. I'm still working on understanding him.
My great-Uncle Ben died when I was very young. I remember little about him, but I do remember that I really liked him and that his death impacted my mother and I very much. We inherited miscellaneous items from him, including a few books. He had a taste for classic French humorists like Rabelais and Voltaire. One day, when I was still quite young, I pulled Gargantua and Pantagruel off of the shelf and began to leaf through it. I saw several bawdy cartoon pictures, which piqued my curiosity. I turned to the first page and read an inscription from my Uncle Ben to my mother, telling her that the book would give her great knowledge and comfort, especially following her divorce. Now I was even more curious to discover how a book full of bawdy pictures might relate to knowledge and comfort. I began reading Gargantua and Pantagruel and it didn't take me long to decide that it was one of the funniest and most enlightening books I had ever encountered. I didn't mention to anyone that I was reading Rabelais, considering him to be the best kept secret of antiquity and fearing that others, especially mom, wouldn't think I should be reading such things. Looking back, I probably had nothing to fear since she knew I was reading Cujo at eight. Maybe she didn't know what was in any of those books. Then again, maybe she did.
Years later, when I walked by Encyclopedia Brittanica's collection of Great Books of the Western World in a university library, the name Rabelais caught my eye. What was he doing side by side with names like Plato, Aquinas, and Newton? Rabelais was one of the only authors I had read in that set, but if the rest of them were his friends, then maybe they had something to offer me. I set a goal to read all of them and completed it within 8 years.
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