"The Classics have guided my life."
Author Rita Mae Brown and pet friends. Photo by Mary Motley Kalergis.
I received my first library card at age five. The librarian protested that I was too young for a card so my adopted mother, who was related to my natural mother (our family is mixed up like a dog’s breakfast), pulled over a library chair, commanded me to climb up, grabbed a returned library book, which was Little Women, and commanded, “Read.”
I did. My card, issued in haste, was much used and treasured. The first book I checked out was a small light blue book, easy to hold in small hands, Bulfinch’s Mythology. I loved it then, I love it now. A copy sits on the Louis XVI desk in the living room along with a few avid cat readers.
The Classics have guided my life. Years of Latin and two years of Greek allowed me to read fully on not only the basis of all Western literature but of our culture. To confront plays, histories, and politics disguised as history undiluted was, and remains, a gift that cannot be overestimated. It is a well from which our Founding Fathers drunk deeply.
Currently, I am reading Cop Town, by Karin Slaughter in bound galleys. In the kitchen rests The Men Who Lost America, by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy. I’m halfway through it and plain dazzled. I just reread Caroline Alexander’s The War That Killed Achilles. I needed to read it twice—and think this is a book I will have to revisit once a year, for it reveals the true Western ethic of war coupled with a hatred of war, right there in the wellspring of our literature. This is a ravishing work and not a little difficult (for me anyway).
I am also rereading Robert Graves’ two volumes of The Greek Myths. One can never read enough Graves.
I can’t wait to read Dying Every Day about Seneca. Lest you think I rarely stray from ancient texts, I giggled through Full Service by Scotty Bowes, a delicious sexual memoir of Hollywood in its glory days.
As you have gathered, I am a promiscuous reader. There’s even the new biography of John Wayne, by Scott Eyman by the bed, plus When the Lion Feeds, by Wilbur A. Smith, his first book of a long career.
Barclay Rives just sent me his newly published book A Country to Serve, about his ancestor William Cabell Rives. If you are a Virginian, you will recognize the surnames Rives and Cabell. We can never get enough of ourselves, a Virginian virtue or sin depending on your outlook.
Reading is breathing for the mind.
Since I have been asked to burble about my reading life I will tell you something I have never before mentioned, which is I was born to hounds and horses, a love predating language. I played with those four-footed wonderful animals before I could speak. Then I also learned to love language, especially English. And so I am reading Xenophon and Arrian on Hunting (With Hounds). Life comes full circle, doesn’t it?
Note: Xenophone born 430 BC wrote of his military experiences, on hunting with hounds and wrote a book on horsemanship as useful today as when he wrote it. Arrian lived 95 AD to 175 AD.
Rita Mae Brown is the bestselling author of the Sneaky Pie Brown series; the Sister Jane series; A Nose for Justice and Murder Unleashed; Rubyfruit Jungle; In Her Day; and Six of One, as well as several other novels. An Emmy-nominated screenwriter and a poet, Brown lives in Afton, Virginia.
This "Writers on Reading" essay was originally published in "At the Scene" eNews June 2014 as a first-look exclusive to our enewsletter subscribers. For more special content available first to our enewsletter subscribers, sign up here.
