WHY I READ

I am a word junkie. I will read anything, including package inserts, insurance mailers and the backs of cereal boxes. I really don't need to know what's in the Cocoa Puffs I'm having for breakfast, but something about the printed word is irresistible.

I don't remember learning to read, but I know I could read when I got to kindergarten. My mother and older sister taught me.

In fact, I came home in tears the first week of kindergarten because I'd been put in the slow readers group (remember the old "blue bird," "red bird," "canary" system?) -- not because I couldn't read but because I told the teacher the phonetically spelled readers we had were wrong.

Mom had that straightened out in no time.

She got the folks at the St. Louis County Public Library system straightened out, too, when I spent a summer reading really depressing French novels that the librarians felt were too advanced for a fifth-grader.

Nothing like "Les Miserables" to make the time fly by. I'm not sure who was more miserable by the end of it, me or Jean Valjean.

Then I went through the "Three Musketeers" series, which outlines what eventually happens to Dumas' famous swordsmen ... in about eight or nine volumes, if I remember.

(Aramis eventually becomes the Cardinal, Porthos marries a rich widow, Athos tries to keep Charles I from being beheaded in England and D'Artagnan becomes a captain of the Guard.)

I read a lot at work, so my free-time reading is pure escapism. I like modern murder mysteries (P.D. James, Elizabeth George, Martha Grimes, Jane Haddam) and I'm addicted to John Dickson Carr's locked-room mysteries and Agatha Christie.

I also love Gothic romances, especially the "Had I but known ..." variety featuring plain (but spirited) governesses being menaced by arrogant (but sensitive) noblemen on the moors.

If Barbara Michaels has a new book out, color it mine. And I can read Victoria Holt's novels two or three times.

And I liked Jane Austen long before she had her own web site, and I still like her now that she's trendy.

My favorite part of reading is scooping up five or six good books from the remainder table at any of our friendly local booksellers, which allows me to combine two of my favorite concepts: Reading and bargain-hunting.

Fiction on the clearance rack. What a concept.