An Unliterary Childhood
Most writers grow up in homes filled with books. Not this writer. My parents’ book collection, accumulated over their nearly 50-year marriage, amounted to roughly two dozen volumes, all of which fit into the nooks of their bedside tables. I’m unsure which, if any, either of them read cover to cover.
It’s not that they didn’t read. They consumed our local St. Louis newspapers, the Post-Dispatch and the Globe-Democrat. My father devoured Time magazine each week, and my mother read the Orthodox Observer, published by the Greek Orthodox Church Archdiocese of America. They both watched the nightly TV news, and KMOX Radio, the AM news station, was on in the background all day. As citizens, my folks were well informed. They just didn’t get their information from books.
When my brothers and I helped our mother move out of the suburban home where we grew up, the two dozen books on the nightstands were the same ones that had been there for decades. A hardback copy of The Godfather, by Mario Puzo. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. Lee Iacocca’s autobiography. Eleni, by Nicholas Gage—a memoir of the Greek Civil War purchased when the author spoke at our church, St. Nicholas. The Hour of the Bell, a historical novel about the Greek War of Independence, also purchased when the author, Harry Mark Petrakis, came by St. Nicholas. The Magus, a postmodern novel of ennui and psychological manipulation, by the British writer John Fowles, that I doubt either of my parents got more than 10 pages into. I suspect they picked it up at a church bazaar because the story was set on a Greek island.
For a young man with literary ambitions yearning to escape into stories of love and adventure, the Glastris home was a desert. Fortunately, I was not such a young man. Reading books was not my thing. I threw my energies into backyard sports, stomping around the woods, and various short-lived enthusiasms—chemistry set experiments, drag-racing model car kits, and taxidermy.
I was vaguely aware that other kids at Robinson Elementary School were devotees of children’s fictional series, like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and in junior high and high school, sci-fi and fantasy tomes like The Hobbit and Dune became the rage. I took no interest in any of these.
I do not fault my parents for this indifference. When my brothers and I were young, they read to us plenty—Curious George, Dr. Seuss, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. As we grew older, they encouraged us to read by dropping us off at the library and buying us an encyclopedia. I availed myself of these opportunities, but mainly by perusing them. On rainy days, I’d pluck out an encyclopedia volume and read a few entries that caught my attention. At the library, I’d pull a few books from the stacks, flip through them, read a few pages, and put them back. I wasn’t looking for stories so much as for information on subjects that interested me: animal life, astronomy, dinosaurs, Native Americans, undersea exploration, ancient civilizations, and anything related to the fairer sex.
The handful of books I owned—The Boy Scout Handbook, Peterson’s Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians—were similarly informational. So too the magazines we subscribed to, like Boys’ Life (a perk that came with Boy Scout membership), Missouri Conservationist (free when you got a fishing license), and Rolling Stone (which I read mainly for the album reviews).
At some point in high school, I started to notice good prose. Joel Vance, a columnist for Missouri Conservationist, wrote first-person tales—of, say, field-dressing a turkey—that were both instructive and humorously self-deprecating. Euell Gibbons, author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus (and famous for his commercials hawking Grape-Nuts cereal), could make you feel like anyone who didn’t forage lamb’s-quarters for dinner was a fool. I still recall a line from Rolling Stone describing ZZ Top as sounding “like someone rummaging through a toolbox.”
The only novels I read were those our English teachers assigned—typically short, socially conscious ones like Animal Farm and Of Mice and Men. But in my junior year of high school, I signed up for honors English. Suddenly, for the first time, I was with the “smart kids,” who were more practiced readers than I, and I found myself plowing through 50 pages a night of Light in August. It was a struggle to follow the plot and remember the characters’ names, much less identify the symbolism and other “deeper meanings.”
Still, I found the challenge more bracing than dispiriting. I also discovered that I had a knack for organizing what I learned from novels into book reports that made cogent enough arguments with few enough grammatical errors that I earned top grades and praise from my teachers. This was quite a dopamine rush—second only to those that came from being able to talk intelligently to some of the “smart girls” in the honors classes, whom I increasingly eyed. By the middle of senior year, one of those young ladies was my girlfriend, and I was beginning to think of myself as an intellectual.
When I showed up for pledge week at the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at the University of Missouri in 1977, I ostentatiously carried a copy of Crime and Punishment. The near-total incomprehension of my fellow Pikes was an early sign that maybe I had picked the wrong college; sophomore year, I transferred to Northwestern University, which was a better fit. I spent the remainder of my undergrad years holed up in the Pike house at NU with like-minded guys smoking weed and discussing elasticity of demand, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, and the deeper meaning of The Wall.
The main feature of my room at the Pike house was a set of shelves made of unpainted wooden boards on cinder blocks, used to house my prized possessions: stereo system, LP collection, aquarium with piranhas, and books. The shelves traveled with me as I moved on to grad school and a series of off-campus apartments. When I married, my wife Kukula, also a great reader (and later the Monthly’s books editor), thought my shelves hideous. She insisted we replace them with a wall of teak bookcases to accommodate both of our growing collections.
While my side featured novels by celebrated authors of the day—Saul Bellow, Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon—my reading tended more toward other genres. One was books by erudite scholars with grand visions: E. O. Wilson on sociobiology, Marvin Harris on cultural materialism, Julian Janes on the origin of consciousness, and Stafford Beer on cybernetics. The other was the literary journalism of writers like George Orwell, Joan Didion, and V. S. Naipaul, who specialized in taking the piss out of grand theories.
That conflict, between the search for unifying explanations and a love of reporting that overturns them, led me to the Washington Monthly, where the journalism embodied that tension. It still does, as you can see in the feature stories of the current issue, which challenge conventional wisdom on everything from reindustrialization to online gambling, artificial intelligence, and college admissions.
Clearly, my unliterary childhood did not stop me from becoming a lover of books. But it did leave marks. One is that I never have learned to read “for fun.” The escapist fare beachgoers pack with their suntan lotion—mysteries, thrillers, westerns, detective stories—do not hold my attention. Nor can I read quickly and lightly for pure pleasure. When I read, it is slowly, deliberately, with 100 percent of my attention. I find reading books immensely rewarding, but a kind of work. I suppose that’s why I can’t read in bed. If I’m tired enough to be in bed, I am too tired to read with the full concentration that is the only way I know how to read. (I can scroll Twitter before nodding off, however.)
The books on my reading table indicate my idea of a good time. There’s a history of the North Sea; a reported narrative about the brains of octopuses; the autobiographies of
Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, Michelle Obama, Joseph Epstein, and Anthony Bourdain; a travelogue of 1930s Europe by Patrick Leigh Fermor; and a collection of essays by Yuval Noah Harari. I have finished a few of these books. The others are bookmarked a quarter of the way in and may stay that way. They’re fascinating, but I manage to acquire books faster than I can finish them.
For someone like me, who reads widely and seriously—but slowly and primarily for information and ideas—the perfect literary genre is the nonfiction book review. Such reviews give me at least the illusion that I’m keeping up with the deluge of interesting books published every year, 99 percent of which I’ll never get to. Book reviews are the first thing I turn to in any publication.
Not surprisingly, we commission many nonfiction book reviews for the Washington Monthly—including the nine in this “fall books issue.” (We also give a prize named for Kukula, who passed away in 2017, for the best reviews published in other outlets.) I tell our editors and writers to treat new books like reporting assignments. Summarize them fairly and clearly for the reader, highlight the facts and formulations that are new and interesting, and assess the plausibility and persuasiveness of the thesis. If a book is well structured and beautifully written, that’s worth mentioning. But even if ill-constructed and clunky, a book deserves respectful coverage if its material advances our knowledge and understanding of an important subject. A Monthly review is not so much an aesthetic judgment to help you decide whether to buy a book as an extension of our journalism, meant to give you enough information about a book that you don’t have to read it.
If you think that’s an excessively utilitarian way to treat the art of nonfiction book writing, what can I say? Blame my parents.
In the print edition of our college guide and rankings issue (September/October 2024), we neglected to note that the story by contributing editor Anne Kim, “Escape from Higher
Ed’s Bermuda Triangle,” was adapted from Incomplete: The Unfinished Revolution in College Remedial Education, a report Kim authored for FutureEd, an independent
think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
Also, in the same issue, due to a production error, the story “America’s Best and Worst Colleges for Women in STEM” displayed the wrong data in the charts entitled “BEST NATURAL RESOURCES” and “WORST NATURAL RESOURCES.”
We regret both errors and have corrected them on our website. —Eds.
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