My husband George and I have gotten reputations for being smart. Once one of his co-workers asked me, "How can you stand being married to a brain like him?" I pointed out that I wasn't that far behind him, intelligence-wise, and her response was, "It would freak me out, being married to someone as smart as he is." Maybe so. Me, I like it. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's men who haven't read a book in years and think there's nothing more interesting to talk about than them. Sorry, guys.
I've always had the problem, not that it is a problem, of reading books considered way too advanced for me. When I was about 14, I wanted to check out a book on lightning and weather from the base library. The librarian asked me twice if I really wanted such a "hard" book. I not only read it and understood it, I read it several times. I also read every astronomy book in this library, including ones considered hard for adults. George is the same way, except that he was reading at an earlier age than I was, and reading adult-level books when he was 10. He said that when he was 3 years old he read Dr. Seuss books to his sister when she was in the hospital. I believe it. He has books about chemistry, physics, mathematics, and statistics in his library, most of which I'm afraid to try to read, including the one called Calculus for Cowards.
When I was in high school, I took two years of Latin, which filled me with an interest not only in mythology, but in word origins and languages. Part of George's dowry of books was a copy of Bullfinch's Mythology, considered to be one of the definitive works on mythology. George also has a fascination with languages; when he was in high school he took French, and when his Sea Explorers troop got to go aboard the Calypso and meet Jacques Cousteau and his team, he started speaking his high school French. Jacques Cousteau told him, "Let's speak English. Your accent is terrible." George couldn't help it; he was speaking French with a Virginia accent, which I think would have been interesting in itself.
Still, we've always read books the general public would consider "hard". One of my favorites is Between Silk and Cyanide, Leo Marks' autobiographical story of working with the code breakers in London during World War II. It is very intelligent and also very funny. I also like anything by P.G. Wodehouse, the British humor writer, who wrote comedies that were also very intelligent and extremely funny. My favorite of Wodehouse's is The Mating Season, a story of mistaken identity. George's tastes lean more toward sci-fi and fantasy; two of his many favorite authors are Philip Dick and Terry Pratchett.
The first time I went to the Sylvia Beach Hotel, which I talk about in one of my other essays, I took my new copy of Wodehouse's anthology of stories about my favorite Wodehouse characters, Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves. Bertie is a naïve and somewhat dense but wealthy young man who gets himself into unbelievable scrapes, and his manservant Jeeves is always able to get him out. Most of these scrapes involving getting out of engagements to women he somehow gets himself engaged to, and most of these are women he would run a mile in tight shoes to avoid (his words). I was sitting in a chair in the library, which was full of guests who were mostly reading things like the New York Times' Theater Arts Section, and they were giving me strange looks because I was sitting there reading my book, trying hard not to giggle too loudly. I finally had to leave the room. This same book had elicited a comment from one of the physical therapists I worked for at the time, when he'd come into the break room to find me in there alone, reading my new book and laughing hysterically, "You sound like you're having way too much fun to be in here by yourself."
Even after reading The Mating Season more times than I can remember, it still makes me laugh. Now that's fun reading.
