There was a time in my life when I read a lot of books. I’m not saying they were classics or even books on the New York Times list of best sellers. Mostly, they were books I was forced to read in school or books popular among pre-adolescent boys, stuff like London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang.

For some strange reason, I really liked London’s works and began to read biographies of his life. Yes, he traveled widely to places like Alaska, the Yukon, Tahiti, and Hawaii, but somehow, the stories and articles based on the “exotic” locations didn’t grab me the way his earlier work about life in the Yukon had. And when he turned to “deep” works like the Iron Heel and the Sea Wolf, he lost me. They were too intellectual for my simplistic brain.

Like every kid, I thought a lot about sex, but the real McCoy wasn’t quite as available then as it is now. We had to satisfy our lust by reading literary tomes like Lady Chatterley’s Lover. For some reason, we thought this was a pornographic novel, and we scoured the book from cover to cover looking for the “right “ words, which had apparently been expurgated from the copies we managed to get our hands on.

We went through the same process with other books like Tropic of Cancer and God’s Little Acre. From the standpoint of a kid looking for vicarious sex, both were sorely disappointing, although I will admit that God’s Little Acre was oddly humorous.

Still, we’d pretty well outgrown mere writings. Real sex was right in front of us because the girls had grown along with us and in some cases ahead of us. We spent enormous amounts of energy maneuvering ourselves into twisted  positions that afforded us a fleeting sight of panties. There wasn’t much satisfaction you might argue and rightly so. But we occasionally received a whack on the side of the head from a feminine hand that satisfied our fantasies until the next whack.

Entering young adulthood, we suddenly became aware of testosterone-laden books like From Here to Eternity, the Naked and the Dead, and Catch 22. These were real books, books for red-blooded American males embarked on world domination. In the pages of these books, we became acquainted with words like “fug.” America had not yet become enlightened enough to permit its fighting men access to graphic language, although language in the ranks, even then, was comprised almost entirely of words such as fuck, motherfucker, asshole, cunt, dick, prick and shit. The ordinary folk antedated George Carlin by a few centuries.

Life seemed to move with the speed of light after that, and the number of books I actually read shrunk to the vanishing point. You know the drill. You get married, have kids, and work your ass off making enough money to buy a gallon of gas. Reading anything becomes a luxury, and on those few occasions you drop into Borders and buy the latest sophisticated best seller in the Bargain Bin, it remains on your “To Read” shelf until the pages turn to dust. Intellectual development virtually ceases.

Still, you think about reading something, anything, just to have at least one book on your Facebook page. Sure, you could lie and no one would know the difference. Who knows who read Catcher in the Rye? No one understands the damned thing, anyway. The way I figure it, a book with a protagonist named Holden Caulfield is for Pacific Heights ladies and gentlemen. Give me Where Eagles Dare anytime. But just in case some elite Marina babe might be impressed, I entered Catcher in the Rye on my FB page. You never know.