A Writer's Biography, Volume I, Part 2: Building Worlds.
By the time I was in middle school, I was voraciously absorbing every single book that interested me and that I could get my hands on. I lived, and lived now, in a Mississippi River town in Iowa with the unique First Nations-based name of Muscatine. By the time I had entered high school, I had raided my grade school, middle school, high school, and public libraries for whatever hidden treasures I could find.
One of the things I realized that there were so many delights - maybe delights adults would have preferred I not see - in those libraries. (I'll likely go into more detail in another post - but it's fair to say that I was one of those who scanned the banned book lists in search of reading material.)
Over the course of a childhood, I would find many of those and many others. It was... what, my escape? What did I really have to escape from? I didn't face any poverty; I had no siblings to compete with for attention; I was coddled and loved with no reservations; my parents were loving and remain together even today. Whatever was left was an awkwardness with people and an isolation from my peers that was both self-inflicted and suggested by more popular peers. To this day, one of the things that I am happy with about my children is that they are better social beings than I ever was or am.
Regardless of whether my problems were either morally dire or simply First World Problems, I retreated more than a little bit into the world of books. Maybe my parents sensed that when they got me an entire encyclopedia set when I was around 10 and I could spend an entire day pulling out the two "S" volumes and seeing what I could learn about that particular day. (Of course, that would have been unnecessary if Wikipedia had existed when I was young. If it had, I have a feeling I would have been addicted to the "random article" link on that page.)
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