a favorite of mine…
I’m currently rereading one of my favorite authors from years past…Isaac Asimov. (I’m into robots yet again!)
And I have a story from him that I’ll share with you here:
In 1925, one year before he entered school, Isaac Asimov taught himself to read. His father, uneducated and thus unable to support his son in this, 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 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 many thousands of 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 is 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’s pithy saying:
Post was inspired by a blog post I read on the internet (as well as my years as an English teacher and as a bookstore owner!)