Reading Spots

I'm going to Boston this weekend, taking Amtrak. While I am looking forward to getting there, I'm also looking forward to the train trip. I like reading on trains. I find it to be a relaxing experience. Planes are good too, but there's just something about long train trips that I find really conducive to reading.

I've packed my bags with clothes, and more importantly reading matter, for the trip. I can't wait.

This has gotten me thinking about great places to read. I know that the one that sticks with me as the strongest visceral memory is sitting on a marble slab in the Grand Palaestra at Pompeii reading H.H. Scullard's From the Gracchi to Nero, which is an excellent and comprehensive history of Rome. I remember feeling like a character in a novel.

Of course, that's not an easily recreated activity. But the best reading experiences often aren't. I love to read and do it a lot, but sometimes the experience transcends where it normally is, and becomes something visceral that you remember as a full sense memory. I remember what I was reading there in Pompeii, but I also remember the feel of the breeze on my skin, the cool shade of the trees after working for days in the hot sun, and the smell of the air. I can remember the tactile feel of that stone slab, it all comes together.

They're not all like that either. No matter how hard I try to convey the wonder of that experience, it can come off a bit sappy. That's fine, I can come off a bit sappy myself.

Here's another visceral memory, a little less sappy. In seventh grade English class, for whatever reason, we had reading time. We were all supposed to bring a book of some kind, and read it to ourselves quietly. There's the key word that got me into trouble, quietly. I was reading, for the first of many times, James Herriot's All Creature's Great and Small, and I started laughing out loud. I got shushed angrily by the teacher, and tried to stifle it.

Ten seconds later, I was laughing again, even harder. Now this teacher was kind of an awkward and unpleasant woman, and she never could quite get a handle on me. She decided that I should be publicly embarrassed, and that the perfect way to teach me not to laugh out loud in class was to make me read it aloud to the whole class.

Have you read All Creature's Great and Small? I credit her by believing that she must not have. It's the autobiography of an English vet, and the work he did in the farm country of the English dales. It's probably one of the best known autobiographies out there. It lead to countless sequels and a successful BBC television series.

I got up there, and I started to read, what had cracked me up. Doing my best performance, in the different accents, I began to read. Dr. Herriot described his struggles with the old, folk remedies still used by many English farmers before WWII. In this case it was a lurid description of how, among other 'cures', the farmer had shoved a pound of raw onions into the horses rectum twice daily for a week, before calling the vet.

This was seventh grade! Needless to say she lost complete control of the class that day as we all fell over each other laughing.

As I write this story I can still feel the pain from grinning and laughing so hard, both in my face, and the muscles in my stomach. I'd love to say that my teacher learned to be a little more cautious of me, but she never did.

Any memories of your own to share?