'My Skill Set is Reading'

“Every day is about reading.”

I know that and perhaps you do as well, but few of us have the nerve to say it aloud, for public consumption. Dedicated reading has devolved into a harmless eccentricity, like collecting watch fobs. When I see a kid playing a video game or staring at his phone, a crabbed little voice in my skull asks, “How long since he last read Dead Souls? Or The Dunciad?” Even I recognize this impulse as annoying and anachronistic but a boy can dream, can’t he?

The observation at the top was delivered Wednesday by my friend Melissa Kean, the centennial historian at Rice University, who spoke on “The Books that Shaped My World,” a series of talks sponsored by the Fondren Library. I’m a rare attender of such events, which have a way of turning into self-congratulatory Dale Carnegie sessions, but I know Melissa is no conduit of hot air. Like many of us, she taught herself to read, at age three. She described the odds and ends that served as reading matter in her childhood home in Iowa, including electronics journals and Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The books that “shaped her world” as a child included Yertle the Turtle (“a dark tale of lust for power and empire building”), the Uncle Remus stories (“deeply insightful about human nature”), and Harriet the Spy (“You’ve got to be careful with what you know about people”). When her daughters were young, she enrolled in a beginning Hebrew class at the Jewish community center in West Omaha. They offered free childcare. Melissa is not Jewish.

She has five degrees, including a Ph.D. in history from Rice and a J.D. from the University of Iowa, and describes herself as “a professional noticer.” Like any sane person, she loves and hates academia. She spoke of favorite novels set in universities, including Lucky Jim, Pictures from an Institution and Stoner. Her taste in short stories overlaps with mine – Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Peter Taylor and Joseph Epstein (“He does late life as well as anyone”). She told the story I recounted on this blog in 2010 about reading The Gulag Archipelago at the beauty parlor. She likes Shakespeare, Dickens, Montaigne and War and Peace (“Everybody loves Natasha”). Like me, Melissa loves to embrace and subvert a good cliché: “My skill set is reading.”