Right now, I am reading:

• a biography of Henry Miller, by Robert Ferguson, which was so kindly donated to my care by
  frumiousb

• a nobel prizewinning novel, A New Life, by Orhan Pamuk, which I picked up at the airport on my way to Istanbul last week
• a compilation of short erotica
• Geert Max’s Amsterdam, which i admit to seldom picking up lately, but which I am still reading
• my new copies of Adbusters and the Economist, which have just come in the mail

I have just finished, in the past week:

• Fat, by Rob Grant, a satirical novel about body image which i really enjoyed, and picked up at the airport on the way home from Istanbul
• Maledicte, by Lane Robins, one of those aforementioned fantastical history/romances that i enjoy so much, which i meant to take on my trip to istanbul, but left in Dick’s car, when he dropped me off at the airport.

Most likely, I will slowly make my way through the rest of the biography.  I’m enjoying it very much, and have been reading just a tiny bit at a time, like eating marbled halva, which i adore and try never to eat very quickly, so i can taste every bit of it.  The nobel novel will probably be finished today.  The erotica gets read one short story at a time, but there are only a couple left, so i’ll move on to the next book of them which is already purchased an on the shelf.  I’ll probably read a bit more of Amsterdam every time I’m between books, since that has been the pattern so far.  The mags will join my bathroom collection until their replacements come.  And i’ll probably acquire a few more of my junk books in the next day or two, since i’ve run out.

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the whole reason i’m discussing this is that i’ve always read a lot.  in 1st grade i was in a reading group by myself (not really a group then) because my mom had taught me the basics when i was 3, so i was kind of ahead, except for rather quickly another classmate or two.  in 3rd grade, i had read every book (probably long before the end) in the small library of ford’s prairie elementary.  in 6th grade, in an effort to find something i hadn’t read in the public library (there were no doubt lots, but you know … perception), i had checked out a (in my memory) gigantic tome, a translation in verse of homer’s iliad, which i skipped recesses to read, worrying my teacher.

and i know this is not quite normal.  but i guess i also don’t quite think it’s all that abnormal, since these types of stories aren’t too exceptional among my friends and acquaintances.  but then i read a passage like this:

“Henry read indiscriminately and widely during his adolescence; even so, one suspects him of exaggerating his precocity.  Excluding the field of sex, there is no area in which we are quite so free to lie as in boasting of our prowess as readers, and Henry took full advantage of the ultimate inscrutability of both the sex-life and the reading life in crating his myth of himself.  The tendency is evident in an interview he gave late in life to a French journalist in which he not only claimed to have read the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu at the tender age of seventeen, but in doing so specifically asked his interviewer to be astonished: ‘In Brooklyn, I ask you!  It’s incredible.  Me reading Lao Tzu in the middle of that crazy family!’…”  (Chapter 2, section 7, p. 34.  Henry Miller: A Life, by Robert Ferguson)

first, yes… of course it’s easy to lie about what we’ve read and when.  it’s also easy to simply remember it incorrectly.  in my personal understanding of henry miller, i’m sure he’s done both.  but as to his claims, i don’t find them impossible at all.  i read the tao te ching the first time around the same age (maybe a little younger even), and then again as a philosophy major at university a few years later.  i’m sure that, as is very true about my reading of the iliad, by the way, i didn’t fully understand.  but that’s part of the joy of reading.  i don’t think you can be too young to understand something.  you’ll just understand different parts of it.  it may be that you aren’t even interested in what you understand, then later, come across it again, reread it, and understand other things, that you completely missed the first time.

hell, like watching clerks when it first came out.  the first 3 times i saw it, i saw new things each time to laugh about.  in that case, maybe part of the problem was that i might have been laughing too much the first time…. 🙂

anyway, i don’t think henry was asking for the interviewer to be astonished that he read it (although, hell, maybe he was), but more that he managed to do it in his circumstances.  and regardless of whether you believe henry’s version of his reality or not, his perception of it is what matters, and makes it astounding or not.