But I'd go to the library, and then a few years later when I had a bicycle, I'd bicycle to the library after school. It was about two miles away, and I'd load the basket on the bicycle up with books, and bring them home. I probably was imitating my brother, because he... he had done that, but I had the desire, and I began to read. Of course, what I read were kids' books. There was one writer in particular that I was fond of named Howard Pese, P E S E; he was, he wrote about the sea, and they were adventure stories for boys.

A few years ago I became curious about Pese; I thought of him, and I ordered about half a dozen of his books off the internet to see what they would be like to read. And I had a good time with them — they were good, they were good. They're boys' adventure stories, full of mystery, full of fog in San Francisco Harbor, and so on.

As time moved on, I began to read the books of Howard Fast. Howard Fast was a popular... a popular writer in the '40s, and he wrote about American historical moments. He has a book about the battle at Valley Forge called Conceived in Liberty; he has a book about... called Citizen Tom Paine about Tom Paine, and so on.  And they were very left-wing; I didn't know this as a kid, but Fast was a Communist, and I believe he also wrote for The Daily Worker, which was the... the daily of the Communist party, so this was a kind of Marxist slant on American history.  And I... I gobbled it up, probably in about the seventh or eighth grade.