To open, I’d like to borrow a line from Graham Greene’s novel, The End of the Affair: “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” This is the point from which I choose to begin my story.

As a child, I played outside. I spent time riding my bike around the North Shore of Staten Island. There were stickball and wiffleball games with neighborhood kids, and two-hand touch football that turned to tackle the second someone’s mom stopped watching us. I bullied some kids and was bullied by others, face-to-face, not through zeroes and ones. Arguments were settled with fists and tears, not words and tactic.

But as I grew up and met new people, I shifted from a life of bellicosity to a more cerebral approach to life. I realized that there was something I could do inside, other than watch TV, and something I could do outside, other than tossing sticks and stones and balls around. Books and I found each other accidentally on walks home from school and everywhere I went. I began reading everything I could. Wishbone had done a fine job at introducing me to the rich world of classic literature, and although I remembered what he taught me, I never sat and read the books he said I should.

And so I tried began with lofty literary pursuits. The language of Shakespeare and Hugo wasn’t impossible, but it took a few reads to understand just what each page was saying. After a few more stuffy novels and collections of sonnets, I quickly decided that, although reading was something I wanted to do more of, I definitely didn’t want to only read the classics.

Around this time, my brother was a freshman at Staten Island Tech, a high school where students are required to learn Russian. He brought home a copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in translation, and it stayed face down on the bathroom floor for a week before I finally picked it up and tried to read the story about so much. This was the first book I read with an open dictionary immediately next to me the whole time. There were characters with three names, and then one, and then a variation on the one. Like drinking too much wine too quickly, it caused a beautiful headache. I finished The Brothers Karamazov with a craving for more work by the Russian author whose name I couldn’t pronounce. My brother brought home a copy of Crime and Punishment, which I started but didn’t finish within the two weeks his library allowed him to borrow it.

My whistle was whetted, but my hunger was far from sated. A few weeks later, my brother, my unintentional Virgil, left a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in the bathroom, and that led me to become the person I am today. On the Road opened my eyes to a world of literature that went beyond existential inquiries, and romances with unnecessary complications.

There’s so much that happened over the course of ten years that I have to summarize. I read a lot. I read a lot of Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Miller (both of them), Genet, Ginsberg, Snyder, Baraka, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Flaubert (for all the wrong reasons), Bukowski, O. Henry, and even a little bit of Joyce. These were the names I turned to most often. It was hard to learn anything else from anyone else directly. Friends suggested big name novels, but no one showed me how to find new books. Didn’t women write books, too? Should I be afraid of Virginia Woolf? Even though I had about two hundred years worth of literature to get through, I wanted to know what people were writing about now (the now that is now then). The harder it became for me to discern which author was worth my time, and which one was just some Oprah’s book club name of the month, the more convinced I became that literature died in the 1980s, and that everything after that time was a perversion of what I loved.

It wasn’t until I started cutting classes in high school and rode the ferry every day that I learned anything about literature. People everywhere read books. If I saw too many people reading the same book, judging a book solely by the cover, I would decide if I should read it or not. I’d walk up Broadway against the flow of traffic and would spend hours in Union Square, watching people who read books, listening to the conversations of people who looked smart, and going to the Strand and the Barnes & Noble in the area picking up books to read. One day I saw a man on the ferry reading a newspaper called TLS. He was wearing round tortoise shell glasses, and I swore that one day, I’d damage my vision enough to need a pair of glasses exactly like his. This chance sighting forever altered the way I heard about books.

College was a commuting affair. The ferry and the subway were my libraries. I went to St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. While it might not have the reputation of an NYU or a New School, a student that realizes a passionate faculty of lesser-known professors is superior to the impersonal experience of sitting in a room with 300 other students and a famous author, will get the most out of any situation. I learned about Feminism and Feminist literature. Yes, women did write, and all it took was 500£ a year and a room of one’s own. Walt Whitman was a writer, too, and Leaves of Grass wasn’t the only collection he wrote. A ‘Brooklyn’ writer should only be labeled as such if they spent their life there, not their college years and a few years in a brownstone.

The library at St. Francis had periodicals I couldn’t get everywhere, like the Paris Review and The New Yorker. The more I immersed myself in these outlets that suggested new literature as well as what older literature I should reconsider, the more I realized that there was a bit of a circle jerk in the literary world. Updike and Bellow for the 60s, and anyone from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop after that. There’s nothing wrong with either of these groups, but I knew there was more out there.

Now, in a GoogleSearchAwayFromDiscovry era, I take advantage of how easy it is for me to find new authors, or books by authors I love but haven’t read yet, and order them left and right. Books pile up and ebooks get forgotten. It’s tsundoku, if that’s actually a Japanese word, all over the place.

After making a promise this New Year’s Eve to my girlfriend and myself that I would begin to put myself out there as yet another over-eager reader whose own writing has yet to bring the acclaim and fame I often think it should, I decided I’d make this blog. It may be like so many others, but I promise to be honest, not cutesy. I might put up pictures of typewriters, but they’re not meant to compensate for a lack of content. I promise to you, dear Reader, that this blog will serve as a way of sharing both newer and older literature with you, so that you don’t have to wait to find someone reading a newspaper on a boat to tell you where to find a book.

Look no further than the good ol’ internet: our home away from home while we’re still home, or anywhere else.

I like cheers as well as chastisements. I take suggestions seriously, and will take into consideration anything someone believes I should review or discuss.