In truth, at that point, I had little literary interest beyond science fiction and the Beats. I had a degree in communication and, outside of what I’d had to read for school and a short time when I was a boy and my physician father, who’d minored in philosophy as an undergraduate at a Jesuit college, offered me dollar bills to convince me to memorize selections from The Great Books of the Western World, I had read little that was published earlier than the first decade of the twentieth century, and not much that wasn’t by an American writer. I’d been a voracious reader ever since I’d discovered the Hardy Boys when I was eight or nine but, compared to the woman I was seeing and those in her circle, I was woefully ignorant of literature. I listened to Supertramp, they listened to Paul Hindemith, and the first time I saw a recording of Vaughan Williams’s “Five Mystical Songs” at the woman’s apartment, I pronounced the composer’s name “Ralph” and she had to correct me: “You say it ‘ Rafe.'”‘ Compared to me, she and her friends all seemed intellectual and sophisticated. I was in my early 20s, living in Seattle during my first year after finishing college, and had just started seeing a graduate student in English. The first time I read Kingsley Amis’s classic campus novel, Lucky Jim, I did it to impress a girl.
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