The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

Narrative & Memoir 43 house contained shelf after shelf of them. Nor were they restricted to the shelves, spilling over into racks on the floor and onto the tables and filling boxes. You could not walk into any room in my house without seeing numerous books. One wall of my room was nearly covered with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and there were still more elsewhere in the room. These books were as diverse as they were numerous, ranging in topic from textbooks on metallurgy and biology to children’s fiction, in age from the nineteenth century to last year, and in complexity from War and Peace to the very most elementary readers. There were books outlining art, literature, history and society, as well as volumes of every genre of fiction imaginable. These, together with my parents’ influence, set the stage for my interest in reading. My parents were actually the root of all the circumstances that led me to enjoy reading. Their own love of reading gave rise to the books in our house, which they had collected over the years. My father, who can finish a six-hundred page novel in a single day, has been especially involved in the assembly and consumption of those books, thoughmymother is in no way exempt. Both of them strongly encouraged me to read prolifically throughout my childhood. In fact, one of the most powerful incentives for me to pick up a book and eventually a pen as a child came indirectly frommy father when he would call us together and bring a story to life. His lively and expressive manner of intonation would animate the worlds of the stories in a way that brought out the subtle humor hidden on a page. Thus my sisters and I would sit and listen and laugh at the ludicrous notions of cowardly dragons and melting wizards, and revel in the wit of Bilbo’s riddles, even as we took in the glorious descriptions, the masterful words, and the sweeping unfolding plots laid out before us by our father’s voice. Those stories became the fire that set a great, rising wind under the wings of our imaginations. That updraft whetted our appetite for more, and soonmy sisters and I were reading those books on our own, our minds transported to faraway worlds where heroes fought and dragons danced the skies even as we turned the pages of the books and filled in the pages of our minds. Soon, just as hearing hadn’t been enough, simply reading wasn’t enough anymore either. We wanted to create, to make dragons dance and heroes fight against terrible evils, just like in the books we read. Somehow, with childlike simplicity, we thought we could make