A Curious Boy

In 1925, one year before he entered school, Isaac Asimov taught himself to read. His father, uneducated and thus unable to support his son, gave him a library card. Without any direction, the curious boy read everything.

“All this incredibly miscellaneous reading, the result of lack of guidance, left its indelible mark. My interest was aroused in twenty different directions and all those interests remained. I have written books on mythology, on the Bible, on Shakespeare, on history, on science, and so on.”

“And so on” led to some 500 books and about 90,000 letters that Asimov wrote or edited. He has books in 9 of the 10 major catagories of the Dewey Decimal Classification System!

Years later when his father looked through one of them, he asked:

“How did you learn all this, Isaac?”

“From you, Pappa,” I said.

“From me? I don’t know any of this.”

“You didn’t have to, Pappa,” I said. “You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble.”

He’s one of my favorite authors and an incredible example of the gifts that can come from reading voraciously and randomly!

And we all (no doubt) know the truth of yet another famous writer, Mark Twain’s pithy saying:

inspired by a blog post I read on the internet (as well as my years as an English teacher and as a bookstore owner!)