Reading time: How well do you read? (Word Count: 1,541)
Part of the joy of reading, I think, is the memory surrounding the act itself. This short passage from Curtis Evan’s excellent, “The Passing Tramp” blog, recently reminded me of that.
I started reading Agatha Christie when I was eight years old. We were living in Mexico City and while shopping at Sanborns Department Store (I loved two things most of all about Sanborns, the bookstalls and the milkshakes) my mother had bought, for eight pesos apiece I believe, four Pocket Christies: Easy to Kill (Murder Is Easy), Funerals Are Fatal (After the Funeral), And Then There Were None and The ABC Murders.
I read all these on a love seat in our third-floor apartment under a big window from which streamed in a wash of afternoon, rays from the sun.
Reading for me has always been a pleasure second only−but occasionally equal to−sex. Although loving, warm, relaxed, giving sex is still the penultimate true joy of this existence (the last being death, where answers are either revealed, or not) there is a dispiriting quest to divide ‘becoming one’ into compartments of ugliness. But that is another conversation.
Reading came to me early with an aroma of wonder. The nose is a wonderful memory trigger; if you don’t savor the smell of a new volume soon after being introduced you are no bibliophile in my book. When you detect its scent in a later time, the doors of the mind unlock and you are awash in an earlier experience.
The “just the facts, ma’am” answer to why that happens is likely brain anatomy. The olfactory bulb processes incoming smells first. It has ‘direct connections to two brain areas that are strongly implicated in emotion and memory: the amygdala and hippocampus. Interestingly, visual, auditory (sound), and tactile (touch) information do not pass through these brain areas. This may be why olfaction, more than any other sense, is so successful at triggering emotions and memories.’ Or so says current science.
Some of this causerie undoubtedly appeared now because I have been happily observing the newest woman in my life, Sophie, our HoundX, snuffling out her new world in our yard and home and I am unconsciously considering what it is she is learning: A new world through her moist black nose-her second or third world-all of them imprinted during her first seven dog years. We are similar in that I had three distinct reading worlds, each with its own olfactory atmosphere, during my early years at Canyon Rim, which sits high on the east bench overlooking the Valley of the Great Salt Lake.
The first of these reading worlds was centered on a tattered set of 1927 encyclopedias called “The Book of Knowledge.” 
They shared an aroma of boiled horse glue from the binding with an effervescence of chalk that wafted up from the ancient coating on the paper. The ink was the heady essence of initiation, secrets revealed, mysteries explained. The editors were wise enough, and perhaps prescient in their understanding of the power of serendipitous education on young minds. Rather than being organized alphabetically by topic, each volume in the 20-volume set was a delicious chunked stew of knowledge to taste. I have included a contents page so you can construct your own metaphor, and a few individual pages for your review. Imagine you and I nestled together or alone in the reading corner while at the same time traveling to the far plains of the universe and bringing home treasure to store in our minds!
My second reading world was the Bookmobile that stopped every week during summers at the top of the long steep hill on Louise Avenue, just one street over from our house on 29th south. The blocks in our neighborhood were two houses backyard-to-backyard wide and about 25-30 long; this was 
the short two-house walk. This is important because it meant I could handily tote the full limit of books home after checking them out from the Bookmobile. But I dillydallied as long as I could, vacillating, adding to and subtracting from my pile, discovering something else I had to read first. I have written elsewhere about the rites and procedures of my childhood, wherein I managed a full essay with five paragraphs worth of words on how I constructed the final pile of, I think, the 15 or so books that were the limit for each child. But I admit that the major reason I took as long as possible was to surreptitiously sniff and savor each of the books in which I was even remotely interested. I might want to replace some in my pile or check them out later, but sensed I did not want to be caught, literally, with my nose [sniffing] in a book. Many things in childhood are taboos; I wasn’t sure this book sniffing wasn’t one of those. Adding subterfuge very likely imprinted the joy of it more deeply.
Along with the thousands of book smells, the Bookmobile carried the added bouquet of its
diesel motor and the sachet of mechanical contrivances that titillate many young boys. I was positive I could detect the sweet diesel smell before I could hear the labored motor shift into low gear for the climb up Louise. My mother made us wait for the Bookmobile’s arrival before turning us loose from our front porch steps to meet it, but I quickly whittled her resolve down to hearing its basso profundo on the ascent. I was usually waiting when the doors opened. And, it was the blended odor of vulcanite and petroleum grease lubricating those doors that started my mind salivating.
Everyone should discover a snug, comfortable cave like my third reading world. Mine was just west, across 29th east, on the precipice lip of the Lake Bonneville bench, an ancient shoreline of an almost vanished pluvial lake that existed until perhaps 500 years after the artist priests of Lascaux were painting their cave walls in 15,000 B.C.E. I discovered it while looking after a little boy (please, I was never a babysitter!), the son of Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs, who lived there. The French use the word cave, pronounced kav, to mean what we might call ‘the basement,’ and more specifically to refer to a wine cellar. The Jacobs had a wine cellar in their cave, but a more important treasure for me, they had box after box of books: all of Frank Baum’s many OZ books 
in early hardback editions with original full color art on the covers and B&Ws mixed inside; also some of Baum’s fantasy novels and smaller books with his poetry. I thought all of these would smell the same, but remember registering slight bewilderment and disappointment that they didn’t. The Jacobs also had what I remember as a full box of smaller, say 5 x 8 inch hardbound books with blue covers. The Baum Oz books seemed huge by comparison. These blue-cover books were illustrated only with black ink silhouettes. All smelled exactly, exactly, the same. Many of them were biographies, I think, stories about people’s lives. My memory of the exact stories themselves is vague but I do remember that I found them intriguing and read every one.
There were boxes of picture travel books that smelled tart and zesty, yet also toasty. Several boxes of science books smelled like chemicals, like a laboratory-a questionably easy connection-but still vivid in my memory. Many random books had the smell of my dad’s office workspace inside the small building at the oil pipeline terminal in Woods Cross where he worked. Also suspicious, but locked nevertheless in my memory, is the chalky, but oaked smell of each of the math books in two smaller boxes. The books were filled with more equations than words, and although the words that were printed appeared to be English, I didn’t understand how they were connected for meaning anything I could understand. This was very clearly a different language, and I perused them infrequently only to marvel at the elegant diagrams and lists of tables and to check, just in case, whether I had been granted the gift of interpretation of tongues.
It may sound like it but I didn’t have my nose in a book all the time, just more, perhaps, than other boys my age. We always played outside in good weather, roaming the neighborhood, playing pick-up baseball games or over-the-line, or hit-the-bat; catch tadpoles, frogs, spiders and garter snakes in the ‘little gully’ with the pond and willows; explore the scrub-oak trails looking for Bloody Mary in the big gully that was off-limits, partly because our mothers feared polio was somehow living in the water there and partly because it was the out-wash of Parley’s Canyon. When it grew too hot I would disappear and secretly find my way to the Jacobs’ house where Mrs. Jacobs would sometimes give me a slice of Wonder Bread with peanut butter and grape jelly, and a glass of milk; then nod me downstairs after making sure I had washed my hands. We had rigged up an old chaise mattress and an orange crate along a cool basement wall lit by summer light, surrounded by the heady wine of words and odors. Reading, I sometimes looked through a glass, darkly, at fantasy worlds; sometimes I put away childish things.
Those three distinct, memorable reading worlds have increased in number. But as it is in so 
many things human, the first times etch deeply. So my toast today to you is, “May you ever continue to have first times!”
CauseriE 