Two Books About Books

There have been two book discoveries that remain marked in my memory as being most serendipitous.

The first—and I cannot recall how or from whom I discovered it—is the Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour. Ironically, it played a part in shaping my view of education. I say ironically because Louis Dearborn LaMoore dropped out of school when he was sixteen and “became a roving laborer, riding freight trains and sailing on an East African schooner. For a time he lived with bandits in Tibet and also worked as an elephant handler, a boxer, and a fruit picker.”((https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Louis-LAmour/275363))

L’Amour gained his education by reading books that accorded with his curiosities and by reading lots of them. His memoir is mostly an account of the books he read, and where he travelled and the interesting jobs he worked while he read them.

The second is reminiscent of the first. Books: A Memoir is by Larry McMurtry, and provides an account of his learning to read books after growing up in a home without them, his love for comic books, and his work as a book dealer.

I discovered McMurtry’s memoir only recently from a colleague but McMurtry is probably best known for his novel, Lonesome Dove, a book I’ve yet to read but recall seeing the film advertised in ’89. I also hope to read his second memoir, A Literary Life, soon but this one reminded me of the days in my own childhood when I could finally read the Hardy Boys series on my own. Of his own experience, McMurtry writes,

With the day-to-day life of our ranch being so crowded, I somehow failed to get around to fantasy—to story, to invention—until one day in 1942 when my cousin Robert Hilburn, on his way to enlist in the new war, stopped by the ranch house and gave me the gift that changed my life. The gift was a box containing nineteen books. To my regret I never got to know Robert Hilburn well. On his return from the Pacific Theatre he stopped by our house again… and gave me a Japanese rifle. Though an ugly thing, it was, for a time, my most prized possession, and I still have it. I had, by this time, read the nineteen books he had given me to tatters…I remember that I started reading Sergeant Silk: The Prairie Scout—a random choice—the minute Robert Hilburn left my room. What I don’t remember is how I learned to read…no one, that I can recall, bothered about teaching me my ABC’s. Yet I could read, and reading very quickly came to seem what I was meant to do. ((pp.7-8))