spacer
Thrive logo
spacer
spacer Log in | spacer
corner spacer corner
spacer
spacer
corner browseissues corner
spacer
spacer
spacer
corner spacer corner
spacer
corner popularlinks corner
spacer
spacer
spacer
corner spacer corner
corner spacer corner
spacer
spacer
spacer
spacer
corner spacer corner
spacer
spacer
corner spacer corner
spacer

Reading: A Love Story
By Joseph Longo

I did not come from a family of readers.

My parents were Sicilian immigrants. My mother read an occasional magazine, but she never read a complete book. My father was semiliterate. Though he bought the New York Daily News every day – mainly to see what horses won at the track.

My first reading memory was comic books. I collected them and had a towering stack in my closet. My hero was Superman. I read that many gay boys growing up in the fifties considered him their favorite because he lived two lives.  I also liked True Crime and Classic Comics. As a teenager, I worked for an Italian grocer and spent all my money on comics. I waited each month for my favorites to come out. I still read comics, but now they’re called graphic novels.

My Aunt Josie was the only one in my family who was a reader. She is ninety and she still reads, mostly romance novels. In fact, she keeps a notebook of the books she’s read so that she doesn’t buy the same book again. Anyway, she introduced me to my first novel: Gone with the Wind. Her copy was dog-eared and world weary. She read it, and then sent it to her husband who was in Europe during WWII, and he had passed it around to his buddies and then brought it home. I read it years after his return.

The first book I fell in love with was John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I couldn’t put it down. Growing up my family lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. It was impossible to have privacy so I spent a lot of time reading in the bathroom. That drove my mother bonkers. She said that I would go blind. I assumed she meant because I was reading too much. Anyway, that book was a revelation to me. The characters were real, and I could identify with them. The novel is about brothers, and because I had a brother with whom I was always at odds, it struck a personal cord. My brother was a baseball fanatic, and I was not. I preferred to read and not sit in front of the TV all day watching baseball. He thought reading was a sissy thing to do.

One night our apartment caught fire while we were asleep. My father rushed us into the street. The next day when we went back to look at the damage, my copy of East of Eden was blackened, water-soaked and unreadable. This devastated me. It was as if I had lost my best friend.

I found our local library. It was a hole in the wall that you could easily miss. I was awed by the place: all those shelves of books, but where to start? The soft-spoken librarian made some suggestions. Start with Robert Lewis Stevenson and Mark Twain, she said. I was dazzled by Treasure Island, wanted to be Jim Hawkins and stow away on a pirate ship.  I also loved Tom Sawyer. He was so American. His Aunt Polly and all the characters he encountered seemed to have come from generations of Americans. I was a first-generation American, and all the older people I knew mostly had foreign accents, and did not come from America.

My mother liked that I read and would tell her friends I always had my nose in a book. But on another level she didn’t like it. I don’t think she thought it was a masculine thing. Also, her aunt had told her if I read too much she would lose me. In a way, she was right. My mother did lose me because of books. Books showed me a world outside of my Bronx neighborhood. They gave me the yen to travel; they fed my wanderlust – my need to get far away from the world I grew up in. When I left home at 18, my mother said I was leaving her because I read books.

I found Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and used that as my inspiration to go across country. I read Henry Miller and had one of his books seized when I entered England because Miller was banned in Britain.

When I went to college in the 1970s, my love for reading continued. I majored in English and went to a progressive college in Boston. Most of the professors had been 1960s Harvard radicals and looked as if they rolled out of bed just before they came to class.  Lee Grove was different. He was also Harvard educated, but he dressed as if he stepped out of GQ. He wore designer suits, crisp shirts and natty ties. His shoes sparkled. He taught a course that was antithetical to how he looked. It was called The Detective in American Fiction. The course was a revelation to me. He was seriously discussing a genre of fiction that I loved but was considered by most to be second-rate. He introduced me to Raymond Chandler and Dasheill Hammett, and I fell in love with them. I still go back and read them with renewed fascination. In fact, almost every semester I include a Chandler or Hammett novel in one of my courses. Lee was a great teacher who loved novels. He once invited students to his house in Cambridge. It was nicely furnished but there were books everywhere, stacks of them.

Getting back to East of Eden, I reread the book about five years ago, and was again enthralled. I decided to use it in one of my courses. It is a big book and some students of the visual generation are resistant to reading in general, and big books in particular. There were the usual groans when I assigned the book. However, the students loved it. They came to class eager to discuss it. That was a satisfying revelation to me.  I was doing my small part to introduce a younger generation to a great book, and thereby encouraging them, hopefully, to be readers.

As I get older, reading has become a more important part of my life. The old cliché holds true: there is nothing more comforting and relaxing than curling up with a good book. It takes me away from my problems, from my aches and pains, from the stresses of life. I like to ease my way into the day reading in bed while sipping tea from my favorite cup, and end the day ensconced in the warmth of my home with my three kitties and my life partner, Bob, contently settled nearby.

Joseph Longo Bio:

I was born in New York City in the borough of the Bronx.  When I reached 18 I travelled extensively through the United States and Europe. When I stopped travelling, I worked in the film industry for a number of years, and then in my late twenties, I tired of the freelance film industry lifestyle, settled in Boston and went to college. I received a BA in English and Education. Then I received an MA in mass communications.

As a graduate student I started to teach English on the college level, and after graduating I continued to teach but also returned to the film industry, where I worked mainly as a scriptwriter for training and educational media: films, video, slide shows, DVDs and audio presentations. I currently live in LA with my partner of 16 years and our three cats. I continue to maintain two careers, writing and teaching, and currently teach on-line English courses for Santa Monica College. My partner and I love to travel, and we are avid hikers.

Back to Stories

spacer
COMMENTS (2) | empowerment, enlightenment, self realization
spacer

Comments

2 Responses to “Reading: A Love Story”

  1. Nancy
    April 18th, 2011 @ 7:27 am

    Thanks for sharing your story, Joe. I loved reading about your family and early reading experiences.

    I was also born in the Bronx to a family of non-readers and/or high school dropouts. Even though dad didn’t complete his education, he always had a hunger for knowledge and encouraged my love of reading from a very early age.

    I just wish I had the self-discipline to finish my degree much sooner. As people always say, better late than never. At 49, I will be the first in my family to have a college degree.

  2. Steve
    June 16th, 2011 @ 11:28 am

    Great story Joe. I never knew you worked in the “industry”. You must have also read Marshall McLuhan’s book about mass media’s influence on the world. I read it in graduate school and thought it was one of the most conceptually insightful books a had read.

Leave a Reply





spacer
spacer
spacer
spacer
spacer
corner spacer corner
spacer
corner spacer corner
spacer
newsletter
spacer
spacer
spacer
corner spacer corner
spacer
corner comments corner
spacer

    Mike

    My wife is an alcoholic she drinks liquor from the time she gets up until the the liquor store closes.im at the crossroa...
    April

    I have been married to my alcoholic husband for 11 years but we have been together for the last 19 years. We met at a ve...
    Tina

    I have been married for 22 years. Both my husband and I were casual drinkers. As the years went by we began drinking m...
    Amy Weisenburger

    What a beautiful message!! My fur-babies, soulmates gave my life tremendous purpose and meaning. Their paw print...
    Frank Sterle Jr.

    Whenever I observe stress in the facial expression of my mother, a typical senior, I also observe how that stress drains...
    Kim

    This was an excellent blog. I have been with my alcoholic husband for 15 years. I felt like I was losing my mind with th...
    Alice

    Helping someone with this issue is hard. And even more if you love him. I know that very well. We struggled with it for ...
    Union Alarm

    The best way is to leave such a person as it is not worth making your life miserable with such a person. I know this as ...
    Nancy Flora

    I think what you mean is a non-drinking member of an alcoholic family. Alcoholism is a family disease. Just as your husb...
    Amanda

    The family is waking up Sunday AM and my alcoholic husband again makes another nasty comment to me. The things he has sa...
    Angel

    I learned how to detach from my drunk husband! Than my mother passed away. All gloves were off after that. My son gradua...
    Lorraine

    Married thirty seven and a half years to an alcoholic. But he is a good person. And he does good deeds for everyone neig...
    jw

    I have been with my husband twenty one years. We have three children together, ages 5,7, and 9. He is a functioning alco...
    Richard Berman

    A emotional story well written with bright eye ups and sad eye downs. A story I could relate to. My grandparents would...
    Gina

    Love this. Just what I needed to read. Thank you for your courage to share this....
    Tired

    I am struggling with detaching, but still trying. I have been with my other half off and on for 5 years. The offs were...
    Debra Grossman

    Thank you for sharing this beautiful story. It nourishes my soul to learn of such special friendships. We humans must ...
    Jack russell

    Really enjoyed reading the website. I have also have a website about this great dog....


    Thank God for your blog. After 37 years of being married to an alcoholic,I've finally reached my breaking point. Emotion...


    Thanx 4 da truth...
    Sandra

    I am from USA, i am 36 years old, i want to gladly give My testimony of how a spell caster dr.mac@yahoo. com brought bac...
    g

    Thank you for your words. As I navigate through marriage with children (11, 5, 3) and I am a stay at home mom, the idea ...
    Catherine Ellen Pettway

    My husband and I married in 1988. He occasionally drank beer but not everyday. He came from a long history of alcoholics...
    Nic

    Thank you Mike for your honesty and vulnerability. It helps to feel a connection with someone who understands the enduri...
    Robert Goldsmith

    Thank you for sharing that very intimate experience and your story. I'm married to an alcoholic and am having severe pro...
    MANDI

    Is this group still going? I love my husband and I knew what I was getting into when I married him. I knew he like to dr...
    Kelly

    Dear Keith, I hope you are at peace now. You are missed by many....
    Delilah Campos

    Dear LaVora, Thank you so much for sharing this intimate experience. I am deeply touched and encouraged by your experie...
    Mary Ellen Bennett

    Thank you so much. I am married to an alcoholic and I have watched him go through rehabilitation and relapse many times....
    Tracy

    Thank you for sharing your story with me Ivor. I'm so glad you had a loving supportive Aunt to guide you out from beneat...
    Daniel Fontana

    I know those kids,especially Snezana.Please send me their contact information....
    Neyhaaa

    I can't thank you enough for sharing this. Yet, thank you....
    Amy

    My daughter is five and her dad is an alcoholic. I know we need to leave. We both own our house and I can't afford a law...
    CPC

    I think this is among the such a lot important info for me. And i'm happy studying your article. However want to statem...
    online festival

    Every year, people in India find different ways to celebrate the same festival, and perhaps this adds new dimension to...
    Karol

    Listening to all the mother's on here is overwhelming for me. I think about what all of you are going through and I can ...
    Vicki Osheka

    This is my second marriage and I came from a non drinking family. Didn't realize what I was getting into when I married...
    Elle

    Wel written article. My husband is walking around totally beligerant. Where he ends up making messes, he has snowballed ...
    Maren

    Thank you for this! 3rd day on Cipralex and a glimmer of hope....


    I 'gave in' recently. I am more hopeful than ever that things will improve for me after reading this article. It is insp...
    LindaJane Riley

    I apologize to everyone who has commented. I didn't know this story was still active. I would like to invite all of ...
    Rahulbh28

    Dear Members, Please help me. . . I'm sharing my painful moments which my brother and my family members are undergoing ...
    rene

    Yes i too lived the nightmare for 45 yrs..when in my marriage the last. 10 yrs my alcoholic lived in the same house and ...
    Grace

    I typed in Google search, overcoming childhood loneliness because I am paying attention to some habits that I have been ...
    Casadina

    I am so thankful that I found this website. I am like others on here and my alcoholic is passed out snoring again. This ...
    Grateful

    I cannot express how much I appreciate your story. I have been with my alcoholic for 11 years and I do not even know my...
    Vic

    I stumbled upon this beautifully written article because I just "gave in" today. I just picked up my perscription of cir...
    Carol

    I have recently begun to admit that my husband is an alcoholic. My heart is broken... I am pissed... I have so many emot...
    TJ

    Thank you for this article. You are the first person who seems to understand why I am still married to an alcoholic. I...
    sariah

    I wept as I read your story. I am currently learning to detach as well after 20 years of marriage to an alcoholic. Leavi...
    LaVora

    Good luck, N. My experience may not be yours. However, I deeply believe that happiness is our birthright. You deserve th...
    nk

    Lavora, I am exactly here in my marriage - trying to turn it around. Rgds, N...
    Suzanne

    Hi Martin and Cathy. Watched your documentary. You are a wonderful family. Everyone has their struggles, no one is exemp...
    admin

    Thank you for letting us know. The link is now set to the their new WEB page. We have our dog from them....
    Linda Jane Riley

    About a year ago I was forced to take a step back from all things related to alcoholism. My husband, Riley, was not drin...
    SHerry

    Your link to the rescue adoption site is for sale with no other info on the dogs....
    Karen Rago

    I think that Jesse is the most adorable jack Russell terrier dog I love watching his videos to...
    Marleen

    Thank you for sharing your story! That's real inspirating!...
    Julie

    Its 4:50am here. I can hear him snoring in the nursery. I brought the baby to bed with me.. He only snores when he drink...
    ld

    I thought I was suffering alone. The advice and comments make me feel better and gives me the strength to go on. Keep th...
    Sam

    Hi Mike, Very poignant, "There are no grown-ups. We are all children in adult garments" is right on the mark. Sufferi...
    TJ

    Thank You!!! Like "judy" commented above my mind was racing and I felt out of control... My life seemed to be falling a...
    Karunakaran

    It's very nice....
    judy

    Thanks for ur writings... it really help my mind to calm down.... where can i go to talk with alot of nonalcoholics??? N...
    Tanya Sousa

    We certainly do have to change the way we respond, don't we Paul? I'm encouraged though. I do see it happening -- althou...
    Paul Trainer

    Thank you, Tanya, this is all so true. As someone who adores starlings too, I know that it is only when you take the tim...
    Cathy

    In reading I see how difficult it is to be married to an alcoholic husband for 30 years and have now discovered that if ...
    carrir

    You took the words right out of my mouth. Xoxo...
    ceri

    What an amazing story of love between step son and step father...
    Caney Texas

    Hello! I've been reading your site for some time now and finally got the bravery to go ahead and give you a shout out fr...
    julie

    what a wonderful article, she described me to a tee , it was nice to put words to the feelings , I am new to cipralex bu...
    michele

    I am hurting so badly right now, it is taking all the strength and coping ability I have just to get through the day! O...
    denise morini

    PLEASE understand that I do not feel redeemed......still...........getting Lexi DID NOT make up for what I did to Jack, ...
    Carleen Quesenberry

    Denise- It is perplexing that you would write a "feel good" story after you abandoned a dog due to your failure to trai...
    Jon

    While I love the article, I caution those reading the post by "finally AM, me." I was in a relationship for 12 years to...
    Wendy Noer

    I felt like I was there, good story Melodee, keep writing. Let me know when you finish another one....


    thank you...
    Sandi

    This is great, Mel! Congratulations! I hope to see more of your writings - especially the novel you're working on......
    Katie

    My name is Katie. I'm 40. I have only visited your website, haven't purchased your book yet. I've been diagnosed bi-...
    Kaylee

    Your story helped convince me to start retaking my cipralex! Thank you!...
    gautam khanal

    Love actually does not have any boundary of Cast,Religion,Profile,Species,Class etc........
    Nayanna Chakrbarty

    Dear Kalpana, Thank you for your kind wishes. I do agree with you, when you think you are all alone that's when He ma...
    Kalpana

    Dear Nayanna, It' such a pleasure reading your experiences with Ganapthi (as I call him). He is so close to my heart ...
    Haley

    Made my day we have no reason to complain bout anything...
    Melissa

    Sorry typo , thank you again ......
    Melissa

    Thank you , LindaJane; I will consider joining. Thank you against for your response .. Be well Melissa...
    Linda J Riley

    UPDATE -- Since I wrote this story, I have created several support groups: Two on Facebook and one on an independent sit...
    Melissa

    For 20 years that had been my life! This last time was so bad , he attacked me then choked his 19 year old twin daughter...
    Steve Sumii

    Joe, What a beautiful story. I visualized the whole story. The ending where you walk with your dad was especially moving...
    JW

    The story now the subject of a documentary aired on Knowledge Network. Video can be seen online at: http://knowled...
    http://tinyurl.com/kovalane39421

    I really would like to book mark this blog, “Turning Trash Into Beauty – Kat Nicotera’s Unique Art Therapy | Thri...
    joybells

    wow. i am going through the same journey! thanks for helping me & assisting me with that journey!...
    Noelle Sterne

    Fangfang-- You have been blessed with a husband and parents who understand that nothing is wasted. And you have learn...
    Fangfang

    Wow ... what a strong and passionate article!! Really?? Nothing is wasted?? I am feeling like I have wasted my life for...
    Pushpa Rawat

    sooo lovely and feel of very true friendship forever...
    Tanya Sousa

    Hi Diane! I'm so glad you enjoyed it. I was so blessed to have her in my life AND to have the parents I had. Also, gr...
    Joyce

    Billie, I found your story very interesting and well-written. Some people would have been judgemental about the conditio...
    Diane

    Shiri, your article is very interesting and brought tears to my eyes. I have been a dog parent/companion to many wonder...
    Diane Schachter

    Tanya, I so enjoyed reading the story of your dog sister. I love how you describe your adventures and relationship with...
    Acamea

    Thank you James. :-)...
spacer
corner spacer corner
spacer
Copyright 2010 thriveinlife.ca. All rights reserved. | Privacy Statement
spacer
spacer