2000-09-19 | 05:13:54

when i was growing up, i was a voracious bookworm.

ok, i know, bookworm = nerd. a given. i even had the requisite ugly, gray, cat-eye-ish glasses. and a messed-up mouth. let's just say the positioning of my front teeth looked like a tribute to stonehenge.** perhaps the crooked chompers were due to my partially english bloodline. thank goodness my parents could afford braces for me. i got them back when they were still wide-load, wrap-around silver bands. i had to wear them for five years. yes, five years. i got my ph.d. in orthodontiaology.

ah, but bookwormage was the topic of choice. so coincidently, the orthodontist's office was in the same little office building as our town's public library. i loooooooooooooooooved going to the library. just ate it up with wasabi and ginger. i drank in the musty smell of books and the water-cooler humming stillness. all those stories sitting shoulder to shoulder in their neat little plastic slipcovers...waiting to transport me to a world where mice could ride motorcycles and pigs and spiders called each other friend.

mmm...my favorites were beverly cleary and e.b. white. they both had enough titles under their belts to keep little nose-in-a-book me happy. and oh the joy when one of their new selections came out.

i would choose three or four tomes for the week because i consumed them rapidly. i'd carry them up to the front desk and whip out my well-worn library card. i can still picture the violet stain left on it indicating its many passages through the due date machine.

once home, i'd curl up in a chair and be gone for hours until my mom called me for our kraft spaghetti dinner.

from cleary and white, i moved onto judy blume. she helped me figure out a lot of confusing teenagey, hormonal stuff. i remember the first time i felt my first little sexual urge, i was reading one her books. i think it was "tiger eyes." probably an innocent boy-kissing-girl scene. i was wedged between the two, floral-and-fringed-bedspread-matching twin beds in the room i shared with my sister when i felt an alarming twinge shooting through my tummy. whoa! what was that?! that electric surge-y feeling? i mean, it was good, but what was it? beats the dickens out of me. speaking of which, charles-y came next in my reading repertoire. of course there was "a christmas carol," but "the tale of two cities" rocked my world in a seriously wonderful way. tres romantique! it is a far, far better thing i read...oh god, *sniff*!

then onto funny stuff, like joseph heller's blisteringly hilarious "catch 22" and douglas adams' "the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" series. heh heh. haw! don't panic! and, speaking of panic, woody allen's short story collections were more fun than a barrel of soon-yis.

thanks to a winona ryder interview, i discovered j.d. salinger's "catcher in the rye" and was blown away. holden caulfield was the man. or rather, the anti-man.

later, jane austen, whose "pride and prejudice" i avoided on english class reading lists because i confused it with "war and peace." heh. once i discovered her, thanks to a co-worker who bullied me into it, i swallowed everything she had ever written whole. however, despite cunning wit in each of her works, none were able to top "pride and prejudice." one of the best romances ever put to paper. maybe the best. ok, yes, it was the best.

the next book i remember really knocking me out was alain de botton's "on love." i'm usually disappointed in books written in the last 20 years. they seem like so much dandruff to me, both in subject matter and style. less than zero, for real. but "on love" was such a real, honest exploration of modern, commitment-phobic love. i can't recommend it enough.

sadly, my reading has dropped off in recent years. it all went downhill when i started having to proofread as a part of my job each day. facing another page of text before bedtime seemed daunting. but i miss it really badly. i keep buying books...just not reading them.

my inner bookworm is just hybernating right now. it'll be back. i've still got a spare pair of ugly, gray glasses...

**apologies must be given. doh! here i thought i was all sassy and smart to do the tooth to stonehenge correlation, then i started thinking that there was something vaguely familiar about it. like, oh, i don't know, like i had STOLEN it from someone? then i started to remember who i had stolen it from. he confirmed it. actually, he thinks he might have gotten it from steven wright. nevertheless, i don't want to be no yellow-bellied plagarist. double doh! so, apologies dan. sorry for the swipe.

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