The story so far

We’re almost through my extant high school diary. I didn’t write in it during my senior year. I was doing other writing. Besides, when I would reread the diary I’d not find it interesting. It began to seem merely a chore.

I’ve been awfully thorough in my review of the reading life, recording blog entries for every book mentioned in the diary, even for books I barely remember or books that didn’t interest me. Does this make for good reading, dear reader?

Alongside reading I’ve started to talk about my writing life – my lobbying for a Creative Writing class, my agonies over English class essays, stories and poems I attempted, and the afterschool Poetry class that opened the gates of poetry, allowing me to step outside. Although I feel like the same person, it’s sometimes been hard to reinhabit an earlier version of Glenn. What did I not know then that I take for granted now? My writing isn’t the same. Not radically different. But different. And I’m the other side of lots of life experience that I could only imagine (poorly) back then. Some travelling, some loving, a different perspective on the parents.

As far as reading itself is concerned, despite doing it a lot, I wasn’t so adventurous in my choices. I read a lot of comic books – though I also bought many comics I didn’t actually sit and read, often just flipping through watching the action. I read the Oz books and had a definite preference for other children’s fantasies over stories set in the mundane world. I didn’t like the world I lived in much. If I had a choice between staying in it for the space of a book or going somewhere far away and full of transformations … it was an easy choice. I did read an occasional nonfantasy novel, and even more occasionally a book of nonfiction.

Though there wasn’t much of a library in our house, we spent hours at the public library. There were worthwhile books on our shelves I never got around to reading, preferring the armload I’d bring home bearing due dates. (This is still too often true.)