How I Learned to Read

  About this time of year, many years ago, a fresh-faced, ruddy-cheeked young native walks downtown in Pittsburgh and stumbles across a jumble of books in a used bookstore window.  No, that isn’t right.  Sounds like he’s walking into the window.  He spies the books in the window and walks into the bookstore.  An old man with long grey hair sits behind the counter, upon which rests a black cat.

This young fella in the bookstore has a five dollar bill in his pocket, and there on the first stand is a purple-covered book with the curious title of At Swim-Two-Birds by the curiously-named Flann O’Brien.  Never hearing of said book or writer, the college freshman picks it up and reads the opening lines:

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.  I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities.  One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with.  A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only int he prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

Three openings followed.  The boy, let’s call him Red, was enthralled.  The price was 79 cents.  He had never known one could write such a thing and it rocked all sense of what he had read before.  On top of that, At Swim-Two-Birds is one of the funniest books of the century.  The late, lamented one, when people actually read books, and not the Web Century. 

If you need a laugh, Flann’s your man.