And, sadly, this might be “normal.” Now. I’ve read several times more books that were autographed to me personally by the authors; usually gifts.
What Passes for Exceptional
I want to give this guy props for trying, but more importantly, I want more people to be aware, that he is EXCEPTIONAL, not average. He’s TRYING.
-sigh- I’d already read considerably more than five books before I ever started school. By now? I couldn’t tell you even to the nearest thousand. I’ve written more than five books; from fiction to crafts to tech manuals. And eye the words so far out of his vocabulary that he had to look them up. Thalidomide? I knew that one in my teens.
And that’s just bound books, or their electronic editions. I’m not counting hundreds-to-thousands pages bills, or court decisions, or research papers, magazine articles, and the like. Just books.
Back in the ’80s ( and roughly the age of our illiterate hero above), I was stationed in New Mexico. I got orders for Turkey, and had some books to unload that I couldn’t take with me. A girl in El Paso expressed an interest, so I told her I’d bring them down. It was hilarious.
She was about twenty and living with her parents. I knocked at the door and her mother answered, to find me standing there with a couple of big brown grocery sacks (remember those?) full of paperbacks. She expressed amazement, called her daughter, and told me to come in. I handed off the bags to W—-, but said I had to go back to my truck.
I came back with a couple more sacks. Mom’s eyes bugged out, and W—- said something about not expecting so many. I just said I’d be back, and went out to my truck again.
In the end, I left approximately 1,500 books with her. Those were just the ones I’d accumulated in my two years in New Mexico. The book stores in town loved me.
A few years later, leaving Georgia for Greece, I did it again. There, I’d been recycling more of my reading material through a used bookstore/exchange. They’d give you credit of one book for each two books you turned in (basically, there were some restrictions on age, condition, genre…). My store credit card wasn’t going to do me any good in Greece, so I gave it a teen girl in town.
It had around 300 books credit on it. Meaning I’d turned in 600 that I’d read. And believe me, not all the books I’d bought in the sorta two years I’d lived there (interrupted by my Desert Shield/Desert Storm deployment) got turned in for credit. I hung on to plenty.
Over the years, I’ve read thousands of fiction, history, law, physics, chemistry, construction, brewing and distillation, cooking, electronics, computer, prospecting and mining, astronomy, cosmology, electrical systems, plumbing, pottery, firearms, solar power systems… and Bog only knows what else… books. And written a lot of material on many of those topics.
So I hate it when I get into an Internet argument with some under-educated clown who’s managed five books in his life, who tells me he knows more because he saw in in a easy book with small words.
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