Transcript
The Mysterious Book I never read an entire book until I came to prison. Or, well, jail actually, when I was going through the trial and sentencing process. I had been in jail for about a week, in a cell by myself in solitary confinement. That first week I basically just slept. On my fifth or sixth day (I'm not really sure which), I woke up to find a book on the floor in the middle of the room. It as Louis L'Amour story, a western. I hated westerns. I remember as a kid my dad was always watching them, and I thought they were old and boring. So I completely ignored the book on the floor, rolled over, and went back to sleep. The next day I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep *1, so I picked up the book and read the back cover. Sounds pretty lame, I thought to myself, but I started reading anyway *2. That first day I was only able to read ten pages in eight hours, and was kind of disgusted. "I only read ten stinkin pages"? So that evening I swore to myself that the next day I would read at least fifteen pages, in the same amount of time. All in all, it took me about six days to finish that one-hundred and twenty page book. It started as a challenge to myself to read faster, then it was to pass the time or learn. To this day I still have no idea where that book came from. I had a chance to ask the guys in the other cells if any of them had slipped the book under my door, but none of them knew where it came from. Since that day nine years ago, I've read over eight-hundred and fifty books including the Webster's Dictionary, the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, every book on the Harvard University Master's in Literature's "required" and "suggested" reading lists, and the entire works of about seventy or so authors. I now love books. I'm currently writing a few short stories and a full length novel, and recently informed that an essay I wrote is be published in an Arizona journal. That one mysterious book appeared seemingly from nowhere, and lead me on the path that I'm still on today. *1. *2. There isn't much to do in solitary other than sleep, pace back and forth, or do push ups in the 4x8 cell.
