Words First Read

I am proud of my first-generation American status. I am so proud that I am tightly entwined to my relatives across the ocean in Italy and at the bottom of the world in Uruguay. It is through the sum of these two amazingly disparate, impossibly vast landscapes that shapes who I am today.

I can say that my work ethic (or my idealized work ethic that I have not yet realized), my passion for the extended family (my mom and dad live upstairs from us; my in-laws a mile away), my resourcefulness, my stubborn do-it-yourselfullness are all rooted in the role model that my mom and dad set for me.

In all that my family could offer me, they were never able to offer the love of learning. They were too practical and busy providing to be concerned about academics. Both my mom and dad have 5th grade educations. Obviously, this does not make them stupid. Quite the opposite, my parents are two of the most intelligent people I ever met. Their infinite resourcefulness always stunned me. Watching my father take an old piece of rug and cut out insoles for his boots is pure brilliance. Everyone else, myself included would have possibly purchased a new pair of insoles, but more than likely, would have just purchased a new pair of boots.

The Dan Leone that loves to write (yes, I admitted it…leave me alone now) and loves to read and loves to learn…absolutely everything, is what has blossomed all within me, in spite of or perhaps because of my parents.

I remember my first trips to the library. When all my friends would hang out at the Friendly’s, I would sneak away to the Newton Free Library in Newton Corner, just about a mile from my house. I would devour books. I remember the non-fiction racks and thumbing through page after page of exotica from the Time-Life series of books about strange cultures, to the symbols of calculus, to the star maps that I keep in my head even to this day.

But, I was a little older, perhaps 7th grade-ish, when I started hanging out in the fiction aisles. At first, all I did was thumb through the pages until I found a particularly titillating chapter and read it. I didn’t know much about what I read, but I knew that I needed to be hiding in the corner to read it.

Up until that point, I put a lot of effort into not reading fiction as I believed that there was no way to learn from fiction. Fiction was a lie….all fiction, a fantasy.

Then I came upon the first book I ever read as an adult: Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Don’t judge me. I know this is a very preachy and rather juvenile book, and perhaps filled with some spiritual elements that I have always been averse to. But this was the first time in my life that a story captured my imagination. The book made me think and showed me the relationships between story and reality; between symbols and truth.

Over the years, this is one of the few books I have ever read over and over again. I still return to it and have read it to the Baby Goats. I own a first edition and a copy in both Spanish and Greek.

After my introduction to fiction, I began devouring books. I devoured Salinger, Irving, Heller, Poe, Hemingway and even some cold war spy stuff like Follet and Ludlum. Each of them, in my face, with words designed to entertain, subvert, thrill and frighten. I loved them all.
As I have grown older, my love for fiction has grown and so had my love for non-fiction. But then as my passion for reading has grown, my time that I feel I can legitimately devote to it has decreased. This is partially due to the fact that I spend a TON of time on the internet, maximizing it for the way in which I learn; completely spontaneously where the word “surfing” was designed just for me.

Question for BoMR: What work of fiction had the earliest or greatest impact on your life?