I took it for granted — that the kids would be bookworms, too. After all, they were born into a house where every wall has a buckling bookcase. Both their parents write books. And my primary self-mythologizing rant is about how my third parent was my local library. Going neither to school nor university, everything I know comes from Warstones Library on Warstones Road, Wolverhampton, where, between 1979-1989, I read pretty much every book. “And with my eyes,” as I would explain, proudly. “Not audiobooks. They don’t count.”
I was both snobbish and proud about the number of books I read — sometimes, one a day; I’m a speed-reader — because I didn’t really have anything else to be proud of. My “natural beauty” had yet to manifest, and my only friend was my dog. Being a book-obsessed amateur intellectual was my only positive attribute.
