reading

I came to reading late and mostly because of hot-rod magazines. There was a subscription to Flying Magazine during junior high, and I read a little of it, but mostly I just looked at the pictures and used it to order colorful brochures from Piper, Cessna and Beechcraft.
People tried to teach me to read in elementary school, but I fell behind because l couldn’t get interested in Dick and Jane and Spot.
Our dowdy high school librarian kept hot-rod magazines, probably because they were in such demand. Our English classes would visit and the boys fought over the hot-rod magazines. It was a start.
As a college freshman I subscribed to Hot Rod and upset a fellow student and friend who believed Henry's Model T was all the car anyone needed. He also believed hot-rods, based on early Fords, were disgusting. I kept a centerfold of a souped up Model T roadster taped to my dorm room wall just to inflame him.
I outgrew hot-rod magazines and subscribed to Car and Driver and Road and Track as I became a college junior. I found a discarded Car and Driver in the college laundromat and it was infinitely more intriguing than Hot Rod.
I also subscribed to Harper's but it was too much. At that time Harper's was a thick tome with few pictures and HUGE-AHHHH articles with words and phrases I couldn’t understand.
But Car and Driver and then Trains Magazine had good writing I could understand. My interests also fueled this pursuit and I would look up words in my beloved Webster's New Collegiate.
After graduating college I began reading in earnest and tackled Herman Melville's Moby Dick. I'd read it as a requirement in 12th grade, but now was reading it because l wanted to. It was much better probably because of that.
I've been reading ever since, subscribing to various magazines and reading paperbacks by Tom Wolfe, Joseph Heller, Hunter Thompson, J.D. Sallinger, Thomas Pynchon, etc.
I also discovered "World Wide News" in Rochester shortly after I moved there in late 1966. I still consider it one of our area's cultural treasures. There is lots of meaningless drivel on the shelves but I can't help perusing while there.
So now the video screen with the Internet and its vast morass of questionable information has supposedly supplanted the book. But I'm still attracted to the written word. I suppose that's because it's what I'm used to. But I can't help observing I don't need power or an ISP.
If the electricity goes I can still read by candlelight. And a paperback or magazine don’t need batteries or a wall socket. Intellectual stimulation is available for little more than the price of carrying it.