I was a bookish boy. I read at school and at home, encouraged by boredom and the summer reading programs at Lincoln Library. I didn’t read to learn; I read to be entertained. (There is no spur to youthful literacy as sharp as crap TV.) I plowed through the entire collection of nonfiction — it didn’t take long — at the Matheny School library. My favorite fare was expurgated biographies of famous men and women from Sun Yat-sen to Mozart. I learned about composers of music I’d never heard, liberators of countries whose names I couldn’t pronounce, civilizations I couldn’t imagine.
