Appendix: readers anonymous
Hi: Welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Redmond Chapter of Readers Anonymous.
My name is Bill, and I’m a book addict. Let me tell you my story.
It began when I was three years old. We lived in a very rundown house, in a very rundown area of Glasgow, Scotland – one of the roughest cities anywhere in the world.
My father was a high-steel construction worker. He spent most of his working life several hundred feet above the ground, on major construction projects like bridges, nuclear generating stations, and so on. He’d left school at the age of 14. In Glasgow, hit worse than most places in the world by the Depression of the 1930s, there was no prospect of a job. So he joined the British Royal Navy, where he spent 17 years of his life.
One picture stays clear in my mind. My father, holding out his hands, palm-upward, saying to me, “Son, the Navy was good for me. But I only ever learned to work with these. You should learn how to work with your head. Get an education, and you’ll have opportunities I never had.”
Well, on the few occasions my parents decided to have a night out, they left me in the care of Tommy Nicholson, the 16-year-old son of neighbors.
Tommy was amazing. Together, we dismantled old clocks and radios and tried to figure out how they worked. But the real magic happened when he’d bring around his collection of school exercise books in which he’d drawn his own comics, filled with the heroes and villains he’d invented. That’s when I first got interested in reading.
Seeing my interest, my mum and dad bought me a 12-volume set of The Children’s Encyclopaedia, written and edited by Arthur Mee. The volumes were bound in red leather, and tooled with gold leaf. God knows what they represented in terms of a fraction of the family’s total disposable income in those days – a small fortune, I imagine. I never appreciated the sacrifice they made until many years after my father died, so I never did get to tell him how much I valued what they’d done.
But the investment paid off. From the age of four until I was 11 or 12, I seldom spent less than two or three hours a day, lying on the kitchen floor, reading those encyclopaedias. I was hooked. I handled those volumes with reverence and respect. Ten years later, when I eventually passed them on to another kid, you’d have thought they’d lain on a bookshelf untouched for the entire time, or been bought new the previous day. There was not a single marked or damaged page or cover.
My reading grew. By the time I was 13, I had to visit the local public library twice a week. Even with my two library tickets, my mum’s tickets, my dad’s tickets and my sister’s, the eight books I could borrow at one time was nowhere near enough. I had to stop back in midweek and borrow a new pile. I counted; at that stage I was reading an average of 17 books a week.
It’s continued ever since. Even working at Microsoft, and with the demands of a family of my own, I seldom read fewer than four books a week. I never set off on a business trip – or even a shopping trip with the family, or a visit to the dentist’s surgery - without a paperback book either tucked down beside the car seat or in my pocket.
Last year – wearing a kilt to honor the past – I stood on stage with Bill Gates at Comdex in Las Vegas, and we announced ClearType to the world. It’s been a long journey from Old Shettleston Road in Glasgow.
Books have taken me from the back streets to the Pacific Northwest, many other parts of the USA, and much of Europe. They’ve been my friends through loneliness and hard times, and my companions in good times. There are books I’ve read once, and books I’ve read 20 times or more, returning to them like old friends.
Books have altered my consciousness and changed my life in many ways. This is one addiction I’m not about to quit.