Scary Tales

I started reading when I was four. Curiously, as I got older but was still very young I didn't much like reading. I preferred looking at picture books. The assumption was that I had taught myself to read, but I think that presumes a more proactive role in the process than was the reality. The fact is I'm more visually oriented than verbally. I learned to read by osmosis when my older brother read children's stories to me, something that he, being a voracious reader, did endlessly. It was a simple matter for me to connect the graphics of the letters, combined into words, with the sound of those words. My older brother was reading Moby Dick by the time he was twelve, while I, by that age, had come to like Picasso far better than the simple pictures of the nursery stories. Maurice Sendak didn't come along until later, alas.