My TBR Pile and Me

I’m a reader.  I read fiction of every genre and non-fiction of almost any type.  And not just books.  Food labels — did you know preservatives have unpronounceable polysyllabic names whose first letter often starts with  ‘X’ or ‘Z’?  Sounds carcinogenic just reading them. Household cleaner directions — if it gets in your eyes, call a doctor or go blind.  Clothing tags — “Don’t wear while ironing,” a tag designed to warn idiots and ward off law suits from same idiots.  Mattress tags — did you know they will arrest you if you tear off the tag?  The mattress cops lie under your bed waiting . . .  Tree Carvings — “Mike & Jim forever,” a recent one. Tattoos — “Larry and Lisa”  tattooed inside a heart, an irreversible mistake that will become the source of endless arguments between Larry and his future wife. “I was drunk.  I swear.  I don’t even remember Lisa.”  Bumper stickers — “Shit Happens,” and it does.  And trophies — Theodore won a chess match when he was 7, and never won anything since. 

But this was not always the case.  I was a slow reader right from the beginning.  My teachers were always advising my parents to leave me back a year because my reading level was two grades behind.  I don’t know why this was so, but I always verbalized words when reading silently and do so till this day.  I was a smart kid who alway got good grades, except in reading. Perhaps it was the reading material they forced on me in those early grades.  Who gives a damn if Dick and Jane failed to take Sally to the county fair, or if Zeke, the janitor, raked leaves off the school yard on Saturday mornings.  I was a kid with a wild imagination who didn’t have time for boring stories that didn’t interest me.  Not when I could daydream about more fascinating things.  But Curious George and Dr. Zeus did interest me.  And I remember going to the elementary school library every chance I had to gobble them up.  So, it wasn’t true.  I could read, and at my grade level, when the story I was reading interested me.  But I was always told I was a slow reader, so I resisted reading unless forced to.  

And then I found comic books.  

The thing about comic books, with the super heroes and their trials and tribulations, is they matched my imagination.  I was one of those kids who would tuck a towel into the back of his shirt, pretend it was a cape, and fly around the thickets of rose bushes and honeysuckle in the backyard pretending to be Superman.  (No, I never jumped off the roof of our house, although I thought about it mightily.) So the first time I saw a comic book, I was hooked.  Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Spiderman, Daredevil, Archie — I couldn’t read enough of them.  Once a month, after receiving my meager allowance, my friends and I would trek to the drug store at the Village Green, a small strip mall, and twirl the comic book rack round and round plucking this one and that one as each came into view.  And that’s what I read.  Not too long after I discovered comic books, I happened upon Mad magazine.  The recurring features like The Lighter Side Of, Spy versus Spy, and Don Martin gags, made me laugh and laugh.  Soon I was reading all the time, but everything had pictures.

Enter my dad, a reading machine.  My dad and I were forever tussling over my lack of interest in reading, and when he saw me with comics, he flipped.  He was a smart man.  Having been moved ahead in high school two grades, he entered NYU at age 16, first in his family to go to college, then on to Columbia University for his masters. 

“Comic Books!  Don’t you know they hinder reading comprehension?  You need to visualize on your own, not with the assistance of pictures.  Reading is the secret to learning, the secret to succeeding in life.”  

I protested.  I try reading books, I said, but most of them bore me because it takes too long to get to the good stuff.  

Hmmm . . . he murmured but said not another word.  The comics were banned for life.  Next day he brought me these books.  They were about sailors on a freighter, whose home base was San Francisco, and who somehow always ended up in the middle of a  murder mystery.  And the stories started off with a bang seizing my imagination right out of the start gate.  I was hooked.  That’s when I started reading books again. I still snuck comics into the house, though, tucking them under my blanket reading them at night.  To this day I don’t know which is more responsible for my rekindled interest in reading: Superman and Spiderman or those sailors?

As time passed, I gradually gained control of my wilder side, and my reading interests matured and broadened.  So here I am, still reading slowly, but with a growing appetite.  There are those whose eyes are too big for their stomachs and those whose reading appetites are too big for their reading speed.  So now I have more books than I can ever read, my TBR pile growing without bound, but that doesn’t stop me.  For the non-reader, a TBR pile is the pile of books lying around your house that you haven’t yet read.  It’s an organic creature that grows and grows until it fills whatever house it lives in.  The Internet is the cause of much of this.  I can access endless lists of books on the Internet and want every book on every list.  If not for e-books, I would be looking for a larger house right now.  

So don’t be discouraged if you are a slow reader.  Read everything, anything, even comics and Mad magazine.  It’s the journey that matters and not how fast you get to your destination.  Besides, slow readers are more faithful to authors.  It takes a long time to write a book.  It should take a long time to read it.  Just make sure you have plenty of room for your TBR pile.  You too can become your own mini-library.