My mother swears that she knew I would be an English major when I was only seven or eight years old, and she points to one single incident as irrefutable evidence of this fact -- The Song of Pentecost.

Long summer vacations were a tradition in my family. My mother teaches first grade and my father works for the University, which meant that both of them were able to shirk any work obligations during the summer months. We would load the fold-down trailer full of Jiffy-Pop and Hamburger Helper and pile the entire family (including two overweight felines and a mutt that passed for a golden retriever) into our tan Plymouth Volare station wagon and head for the mountains. And we wouldn't return for at least a month.

My parents liked to call this "vacationing"; I liked to call it "driving". The first leg of the trip was always the 1001 miles to Sheridan, Wyoming -- fifteen hours straight through, stopping only for gas and an occasional bologna sandwich. Long days were not uncommon. It is six hours from Sheridan to Yellowstone, eight hours from Yellowstone to Glacier, and that was just getting started. Five thousand miles a month was not an uncommon total. I remember one trip that started in Iowa City and ended in the nether northern reaches of British Columbia -- by way of California.

As a fourth-grader, there are only two ways to spend long stretches in the car -- reading and sleeping. I love to sleep, and I did a lot of sleeping, but this still left many hours to pass, and so I read -- a lot. I read The Hobbit in two days. I would devour a Choose Your Own Adventure in one sitting (not reading just one ending, but all off them, before I put the book down). On those "drives" I think a safe estimate would be that I read one page for every mile traveled.

The book that my mother points to as her proof of raising a seven year old English major, The Song of Pentecost, was a book that I read, cover to cover, laying across the back seat of our station wagon. The book tells the story of a group of mice who, driven from their homes, were forced to seek refuge in a distant land. It is written as a parable to some religious story about searching for the Promised Land but, as a seven year old, it was simply about mice. In the end, the lead mouse, Pentecost, leads the mice to a new and better place, and is thoughtlessly killed by a young boy with a slingshot. I was devastated. I cried. I didn't just tear up and feel my throat tighten as I tried to hold back -- I bawled. I sobbed. We're talking about snot dripping from my nose and slobber from my mouth. I sat up, peered my head over the front seat, and read the last paragraph to my mom and dad. It must have been torturous for them to listen to me sob through the last paragraph of that book (especially since they hadn't read the first 214 pages), but they did. When I stammered out the last word of the book Mom turned to Dad and simply said, "He's going to be an English major".

Although she knew this when I was seven years old, I didn't realize it until I was twenty years old and, at that point in my college career, it was a surprise to me. I was not a standout English student growing up. In fact, I was downright hostile to English class during most of my life.

The first book I ever remember was a book called Howard, which was a picture book about a duck that misses his migration south. He spends the winter in New York City shacking up with tomcats, rats, and pigeons. The "displaced animals" genre seems to be of great interest to me, but it is not a popular genre in adult literature for some reason.

Aside from The Song of Pentecost, the only other book that I remember reading in elementary school was The Hobbit. The tales of hobbits and dwarves fascinated me, and introduced me to the world of fantasy, which was a world I inhabited almost exclusively during my junior high years. After reading The Hobbit I quickly explored the Lord of the Rings series. At the same time my friend introduced me to the world of the Dungeons & Dragons series books and I had all the reading material I needed to get me through junior high, and I loved it. My only diversion from elves and ogres was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books by Douglas Adams, which I greatly enjoyed, yet left no lasting impression on me at all.

During grades seven through twelve I only remember reading four books in school, To Kill A Mockingbird, Where the Red Fern Grows, Animal Farm, and The Great Gatsby. The first two I read with the same enthusiasm and love as The Song of Pentecost. I was assigned only the first chapter of both books and didn't put them down until their poignant finales (crying, of course). Animal Farm intrigued me, yet I think much of it was lost on me. I hated The Great Gatsby and likely didn't finish it, despite it being assigned.

It alarms me that I can only remember reading four books in six years of secondary school. I'm sure that I left out a novel here or there, but I don't recall reading much in English class. I don't know what the hell we did for six years, but we must have been doing something. What I do recall is that I hated English class and my English teachers hated me. I have the honor of likely being the only English major ever to be permanently kicked out of tenth grade English class.

The amazing thing is that, outside of English class, I loved to read. I read a lot in my spare time. I read increasingly less fantasy and increasingly more techothrillers. I read all of Michael Crighton, Anne Rice, and Tom Clancy. Tom Clancy was my favorite and his Without Remorse is still one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read. His Clear and Present Danger and Sum of All Fears allowed me to survive a three-week stint in Ukraine where I was one of two English speakers within an hour radius. (Luckily the other was a seventeen year old Russian with California blonde looks and a passing interest in Americans. Without her, it would have taken Clancy's whole damn collection to survive that exchange.)

Once a year, no questions asked, my mother would call me in sick to school, and I was allowed to spend the day doing whatever my heart desired. Every year I used that day to read a good book. The last time I did that, my senior year, it was The Things They Carried.       

As expected, my reading tastes have changed greatly since I started college and became an English major. I like to think that my taste in literature is more sophisticated. I have been introduced to amazing authors and phenomenal texts. I've discovered authors such as Kerouac, Ginsberg, Dosteyevky, Tolstoy, Rushdie, Irvine Welsh, and (my personal favorite) Angela Carter. Works like On the Road, Howl, War and Peace, The Satanic Verses, and The Bloody Chamber have forever changed the way I see myself and the world around me. Because of On the Road I've become a fan of the "travel narrative", a genre that I still enjoy. Howl was the first poem I ever read that grabbed me by the ears and made poetry "cool" in my eyes. Angela Carter's rewriting of classic fairy tales introduced me into the world of feminism in a way that was insightful and entertaining. War and Peace is the first book that I read that made me so upset that I threw it through the TV screen -- my first copy was missing eighty pages in the middle of the text, a fact that facilitated a complete "meltdown" on my part when it was discovered mid-read.

I love literature, and there are few things I enjoy more than being assigned a book that I've never read, and then love. The unfortunate side of this is that I am a lot more selective over what I read. Sometimes I find it difficult to enjoy many books because I hold them up against the works of other authors, and I feel that they don't measure up. Friends hand me books that they've enjoyed and I find the writing bland and lifeless -- but everyone is after you've read Angela Carter. The bar has been raised a lot higher by the authors I've been introduced to, and any old book no longer suffices.

Although fiction is still my first love, I am fast becoming a rather rabid nonfiction reader, likely because of my father, and my picky taste when selecting fiction. My dad has not read a fiction book since college -- he detests them. As I get older, I find that I am more inquisitive about things undiscovered, thus my interest in travel literature and non-fiction texts. I enjoy historical narratives like Livingstone's journeys through Africa, pirate narratives of life on the high seas, Jim Bridger's travels through Montana, and modern day texts of mid-life crisis men stomping through the Congo or Borneo. I love to travel and, when I'm not traveling, I live vicariously through the authors who visit places I have not yet visited. I'm also reading a lot of history texts. My Irish ancestry and visits to Ireland led me to books on Irish history, and my interest in "exotic" places has led me to read about the colonization of Africa and South America. I'm also increasingly interested in biographies. Interesting people have led me to biographies on Rasputin, Bob Dylan, and Van Gogh. My most recent nonfiction work is a 2000 page book titled, The History of the World, which chronicles the history of the world since the beginning of man. I figure it will be interesting to see how the author piles 10,000 years of history into 2000 pages -- and I'll probably learn something too.

For me, there is little difference between reading for class and reading for pleasure. I don't get to choose the books that I read for class, but I get to pick the classes, and that leaves me some discretion with what I will read. When I pick up a book for class I always try and read it like I chose it. From the first page I try and get into it, hoping that it will be the next amazing work that I'll read. I enjoy reading, and even books I don't aesthetically enjoy contain information that I might find interesting. I try to make all books fun, even when they might not be.

This attitude towards textbooks has not always been the case. When I was an undergraduate I took a number of literature courses and I read all the time, but rarely was I able to enjoy books that were assigned. Reading them felt forced, largely because of the time constraints involved with reading for class. I do like reading at my own pace, and I always have at least two books going at once. If I'm in the mood for fiction I read one thing; if I desire nonfiction, I have another book that I'm working on. For class, you don't have this luxury. I only know that I must read 550 pages of Confessions of a Thug for Wednesday. After I graduated I didn't pick up a book for three months, because I just needed a break from texts. Reading had become work, and it took me a while to enjoy reading again.

Another interesting thing I just discovered is that I read more when I'm more intellectually challenged. My personal reading appetite has grown since I came back to school (and my writing has grown exponentially since I've started working with students on their writing). Studying makes me even more eager to read and learn.

I love to read. Even this semester, with a wife, work, 15 hours of classes, and 1300 pages of reading a week, I still find time to read. I work my hours, read my texts, write my papers, and, at the end of the evening, I spend my last waking hours reading whatever the hell I want. Tonight I'll join my heroine-addicted Scottish friends in Trainspotting for a few chapters before I read a couple letters from my friend Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo. When I'm too tired to read another word, I turn out the lights.