Thanks for the Books

I've won very few awards in my life. I like to think I would have won more if I wasn't so lazy. But the first (and I'm trying to think, but it could be the only one) was for "most books read in kindergarten," away back in 1948. I lived in Badger, Iowa, a town of 300 or so Norwegian farmers and their relatives, and began my education in the same two-room schoolhouse that my grandmother had attended.

Books have been my life since that time. I don't know what I would have done without them. Here are a very few among the proverbial 10,000 things:

CHILDHOOD
I don't remember these specific titles.
But you get the gist of the thing.


TEENS
(keep the "n" word!)
(my mother's, for years I wanted red hair and green eyes)
(this took two tries, I made myself sound out Russian names)
Used to be I knew the way up Everest by heart.
Honesty demands I include this one. I snuck it into school and lectured my friends on sex.

COLLEGE




THE REST OF MY LIFE in Fiction
and all that followed ...



.................and Non-fiction


in which I discover that the answer to science is beauty

A few more sides of that story.

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