I wrote here a few days ago about heroic readers like Janet Malcolm who took a gargantuan novel by Gertrude Stein and chopped it up with a kitchen knife into smaller more "readable" sections. Others were Ammon Shea (who recently published a book about reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary) and David Plotz (who recently published a book about reading every single word of the Bible). These exploits caused me to remember and describe my own long summers of backyard reading in the 1980s. And then yesterday, in that odd way things happen, I stumbled on an envelope of old snapshots including a few of myself – documenting those same summers of backyard reading (and Eighties-appropriate tanning) that I had tried to blog about in mere words. I was beginning to write articles in those years, in order to get myself established, and most of the labor was done under the shelter of that lavish fern which I had planted a few years earlier. It was initially a tiny thing, not big enough to preside over anybody except a mole.
