I've won very few awards in my life. I like to think I would have won more if I wasn't so lazy. But the first (and I'm trying to think, but it could be the only one) was for "most books read in kindergarten," away back in 1948. I lived in Badger, Iowa, a town of 300 or so Norwegian farmers and their relatives, and began my education in the same two-room schoolhouse that my grandmother had attended.
Books have been my life since that time. I don't know what I would have done without them. Here are a very few among the proverbial 10,000 things:
CHILDHOOD
I don't remember these specific titles.
But you get the gist of the thing.
TEENS
(keep the "n" word!)
(my mother's, for years I wanted red hair and green eyes)
(this took two tries, I made myself sound out Russian names)
Used to be I knew the way up Everest by heart.
Honesty demands I include this one. I snuck it into school and lectured my friends on sex.
COLLEGE
THE REST OF MY LIFE in Fiction
and all that followed ...
.................and Non-fiction
in which I discover that the answer to science is beauty
A few more sides of that story.