"The first word I learned to read was
We," he told
AAYA. "I was sitting in the garage of my family home on Monrovia Street in Costa Mesa, California. A book was open in my lap, and my father pointed out the word. I liked the capital W, but I probably thought, as I think now, that a word with such a handsome beginning should be a little longer.
We is such a short word, but it shows that in a small space a word can stand for so much." Like most teenagers, Cadnum watched television. Nevertheless he derived greater pleasure from reading, as he observed in the
AAYA interview: "I have always felt our lives are too small, too thin and insubstantial. When we watch television--and I have always watched a lot of television--we are powerfully distracted from our routines, but only through reading are we really nourished."
The future poet and novelist was a voracious reader--"I always used to read everything I could get my hands on, from the steamiest trash to very difficult philosophy books I sometimes struggled to understand"--and through books he discovered the world. "By reading I was decoding the secrets the world around me did not want me to have," he told AAYA, "parting the curtain and seeing the other, full-color existence that did not try to sell me beer or a new car." For Cadnum the key to these secrets is the library.
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