I had a hard time learning to read, but once I got the hang of it, I never looked back.

As a kid, I read to escape a less than ideal reality. I read behind sofas, in closets with a flashlight, under the covers with flashlight, in tents at the summer camps to which I was banished. I wasn't choosy as I am now. I read everything--even the forbidden comic books in cabins on rainy days at camp. I was amused and thrilled, too, when I saw how much Marvel had ripped off from Greek mythology and the thousand page book of "Fairy Tales of Every Land" that I had plowed my way through during my bout with the German Measles. My parents assured me that I had "ruined my eyes" doing this, along with all that "reading in the dark." This, despite the plain fact that my father couldn't see his hand in front of his face without his glasses, so it shouldn't have been too unexpected, really, that I was just as near-sighted.

I remember reading a lot huddling in corners of bars, out of the way of the staff and the feet of patrons, in soft, fragrant West Indian nights. My mother went there yearly to keep herself from recurrent bouts of pneumonia--or at least that was the state reason. I fished books out of wastebaskets in the sitting room of the warm, wonderful Hotel in St. Lawrence Gap, which has probably fallen into the glorious turquoise Barbadean sea by now, or been replaced by some mega-story, inter-galactic Sheraton. That was how I found "The Tales of Hoffmann," "The Daughter of Time," and many books by Georgette Heyer, (grandmother of the knock-off Jane Austen,) and Jean Plaidy, who wrote many, many historicals, which even at ten I found rather repetitive. There were also adult books which scared this broody kid to death, like "Something of Value," full of murder and torture, etc. And don’t think ETA Hoffmann didn’t scare me, too. I was as frightened by the idea of a girl who would instantly die if she sang, as I was by Mau-Maus.

We had one used book store in my small New York State home town with a grumpy old proprietor and his even meaner fat old gray cat, who mauled me every time I tried to pet him. Despite the efforts of both owner and his cat to discourage me, I haunted the place, poking through the shelves, sitting on the bare board floor and reading. Here, I found Victorian and Edwardian novels. Their slow pace and elegant descriptive paragraphs drew me in like quick sand. You see, I was an only child of disinterested parents, and we had two channels on our black and white T.V. I had very little else to do during the long snowy winters except read, and that’s what I did. My parents both brought their childhood libraries with them, and I read "Tom Swift" by the shelf and "An Indian Boyhood" by Charles Eastman which belonged to my father. "The Water Babies" by the reformer, Charles Kingsley, and "Kidnapped" by R. L. Stevenson and all those "Twins" books ("Colonial Twins," "Scotch Twins," "Cave Twins," "Dutch Twins," ad infinitum) had belonged to my mother.

I still read in the bathtub. Did you know you can take an e-reader into the tub if you plastic bag and seal it? I had a Rocket with a back light, so before the stock market (and a software problem) killed it, I continued the practice of reading while others slept. As I get older, "not sleeping" is more and more of the night. It's a perfect time, quiet and with no interruptions except for the cats, who can still place their fannies unerringly upon the one paragraph I'm trying to read. Still, a cat in lap and a good book in hand are just about perfection.