I'm on Book 12 of The Wheel of Time series (The Gathering Storm).  I read book series like I watch streaming shows - to the exclusion of everything else.  Which means I haven't read anything but this series since I started it, so my "to read" pile has grown quite a bit.  While I enjoy the characters and the story overall, it has been quite a commitment.  Now that I am into the Brandon Sanderson volumes, they are moving at a brisker pace, which I appreciate.

My earliest memory of reading was a Hardy Boys book.  When my family would take the long drive from Dallas to Wichita and back for holidays and visits, my folks would buy me and my brother a Hardy Boys book for the trip.  Maybe it was to keep us quiet for the trip, but it opened up the rich world of reading to me.  I started reading Nancy Drew during that time, and quickly made the leap from her to Agatha Christie, because the mystery and intrigue captured me.  There wasn't a time in these early years before high school that I wasn't reading something, but only those three stand out for me.

In high school, I must have started reading some fantasy, evolving out of my comic book phase.  I worked for a time at a comic book store in Mesquite that also sold D&D materials and fantasy/sci-fi novels.  The first I can clearly remember was the Camber series by Katherine Kurtz, which I thought was brilliant.  This was the first series in which I saw an author shape an entire world system and culture, and it awakened a sense of the power of literary creation.  I would go on to read widely in the genre, primarily fantasy, working my way through the greats of the 80s and 90s:  Piers Anthony, Anne McCaffrey, Stephen R. Donaldson, Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Asimov, Brooks, Brin, Chalker, and so many more.  It goes without saying that I have reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy many times.  The writers that most impacted me during this period and even today, though, are Ursula K. Le Guin and Patricia A. McKillip.  They both write with such economy, beauty, and precision, in a way that envelops the reader.

High school also introduced me to British literature, and it was in my senior year that I read pieces of Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and a Shakespeare play, all of which, forty years later, I find myself teaching to other seniors in Texas.  Their medieval and Renaissance aspects very much aligned with the fantasy novels I was immersed in, so fantasy served as a key to unlock the treasure chest of classical literature.  I read a lot of Shakespeare and Le Morte d'Arthur and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and finally figured out what all the fuss was about with The Miller's Tale.

This ancient literature then served as the key to history and philosophy, and so when I began college, I read widely not only about British history but from British history, such as Anselm of Canterbury, Bede, and Alfred the Great.  Though I had started college pursuing a Marine Biology degree, I shifted in my second year to history and literature, and the college library became my new home.  I went down an ecstatic path, literarily, and still have the copies of St. John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul and St. Teresa of Avila's Way of Perfection that I annotated as I read.  They lead me to St. Augustine's Confessions and City of God, and then it was just a short hop to Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius, and oh so many other early Christian writers, each of whom sent me off to explore something in another book.  All while still managing to squeeze in some David Eddings or Larry Niven.

Reading in Christian theology lead me into other religions, and so I read the Qur'an, the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, pieces of the Ramayana, Tao Te Ching, and Buddhist texts, which branched me out into the history and literature of the world.  Because I had to take a language in college, and I chose Latin, a small number of such students at my university.  Latin led me to Cicero, Ovid, and Lucretius, and they in turn lead me to Plato, Hesiod, Homer, and Aristophanes.  So up to and throughout college, I was steeped in world literature, history, and philosophy, or contemporary books about those topics.

I didn't start reading contemporary fiction until after I graduated college in 1988.  While doing a brief stint in the masters program at my college, I read the likes of Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, Byron and Milton and and other giants of the 18th and 19th centuries.  I went through a gothic phase after reading Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey including Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Lewis' The Monk (which, if you know, you know).  But nothing truly contemporary.  It wasn't until a friend of mine suggested that I read Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood that I learned what modern fiction had to offer.  Shortly after that, she also recommended Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy.  I would read it at night and while I ate my lunch in one of the countless parks in New York City.  I made the mistake of finishing the book during one such lunch, crying so hard I couldn't see the words on the page and gasping to breathe.  Only then did I learn that a story can punch you in the gut and make you ask for more.

Over the last few decades, I've been drawn to women storytellers, it seems.  Amy Tam is among my top favorite authors, along with Atwood and Ann Patchett.  I'm also a huge fan of Umberto Eco, Tom Robbins, and Arundhati Roy.  When I finished reading Miranda July's The Last Bad Man, I had an awakening:  "You can do that in a novel?  Remarkable!"  I prefer stories that explore our interrelation and connection, our shared struggles and our weirdness, the pain we bring ourselves and others, the healing we bring ourselves and others, our human sorrows and joys, our struggle to find meaning amid oppressive forces and conditions, and the oddity, the very perplexity, of existence.

My reading journey continues, and there are so many wonderful books still to discover.  At the end of the school year each year, I give my students (all seniors) one piece of advice:  Read books.  Read every book.

That's my goal.