cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

My earliest memory is learning to read. I was three years old. One of my sisters was seven, and learning phonics in school. We were lying on the hardwood floor in the foyer of our drafty old house in western Pennsylvania, and she was reading Dr. Seuss books to me. I already knew the alphabet, but she explained all about how letters made sounds, and those sounds formed words. Eureka! A lightbulb went on over my head, just like in a Warner Brothers cartoon. I read my first book right there on the floor. I think it was Dr. Seuss' Hop on Pop . Another early favorite was The Little Engine that Could ( I think I can, I think I can... ). I read everything I could get my hands on. There was no shortage of books in the house, but I'd read anything — cereal boxes, milk cartons, shampoo bottles. When I was eight, my older brother went to college, and he sent me a lot of books that were inappropriate for my age. I remember reading Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon when I was about ...

On Thursday, November 29, 1877, Thomas Edison revealed a device that was to fuel all of my adolescent fantasies: the phonograph. It's difficult for me to imagine what life must have been like before recorded music. I recently completed a novel in which the heroine is a violinist, the hero a composer. In the first scene, she desperately tries to memorize the song she's just heard played. Without a way of recording the music, she had little hope of remembering the piece after only one hearing. Yes, there was sheet music, but it's difficult to recreate an entire symphony when you're looking at one instrument's part at a time. Edison's first attempt wasn't all that different from the record players I knew and loved during my youth. There was a spinning cylinder, a groove, and a needle; there were speakers. When I was a child, I watched a man walk on the moon for the first time. At school that autumn, I was one of a dozen children in my class who dreamed of becom...