My husband and I are both devoted readers. We always have been. From the time we were children together, at age fourteen we would go along to the local library, among other destinations of mutual interest. We did a lot of walking together, we went to area greenspaces whenever we could. When we were first married sixty-three years ago we began to collect books; not many, however, since we hadn't much of an income to spare back then.

Our children and our grandchild have a love of reading, none of the four more so than our granddaughter who venerates books, cannot tolerate mishandling them, like her uncle, our oldest son. At the present time I am reading a book whose physical condition would make her shudder; an old paperback that has seen much better days long before we acquired it, and I've no idea when it joined our collection. My husband now and again browses through our books looking for 'something to read'. I never have any problems like that, there are so many books I intend to read that reside within our extensive collection, many of which were acquired second-hand.

Both our night tables are stacked with books. Mine tend to be historical, biographical and white-adventure books in Arctic exploration and Himalayan mountain-climbing, interests my husband shares, though his night-time reading is mostly confined to detective novels alongside French and British classic literature. We've bookshelves all over the house. I believe that the weight of the books in our house would easily balance against the weight of our household furniture.

After he finished reading My Childhood by Maxim Gorky, my husband informed me of some details and recommended I not read it, because he found the brutality in it experienced by the child that Gorky was, so upsetting. But I'm reading it and am glad about that, because it's a fascinating read, one that combines moments of tenderness as a spark of humanity within the larger context of uncivil violence.

The mature and introspective Gorky wrote from the child's lens in his then-adult eye of his experiences growing up in his grandfather's household when his widowed mother left him there, going off herself to live elsewhere because her paternal home was anathema to her spirit and her humanity. Gorky never appears to blame his mother for abandoning him and possibly this is because her mother, his grandmother, became his spiritual angel.

The child's-eye remembrance and account of a dysfunctional family where the inheritance of psychotic violence endowed the psychopathy of his two uncles is stark and  horribly disturbing in the context of everyday life in mid-19th Century Russia. Gorky's family did not live in abject poverty; his grandfather and his two uncles were artisans, dyers of cloth, living in a then-moderate-income enclave of others producing goods required by society. They had reasonable accommodations however cramped, and ample food. What they lacked lamentably was compassion for one another, although Gorky's grandmother attempted to make amends. She could do nothing to protect her two daughters-in-law from the intimate rampages of her disturbingly feckless sons who ended up killing their wives. There were no repercussions save those of conscience.

Maxim Gorky wrote of his experiences, his impressions of his formative years' exposure to this dreadful family situation. His dreaded grandfather, capable of random moments of tenderness, but who inflicted vicious thrashings upon all his grandchildren on a weekly basis, sometimes leaving Gorky then a child of 4, 5, 6 years of age deathly ill and bed-ridden for weeks while recovering is described as a merciless tyrant. By the time the child, impressionable, and forever scarred by life with his extended family was eight years old, his grandfather declared him persona non grata in their broken household, sending him into the world to fend for himself.

My mother's family lived in Russia's Pale of Settlement, an especial geography set aside for Jews as, presumably, punishment for being Jews. Which gave her exposure to various cross-cultural and -language streams. At the time of the Russian Revolution, her older brothers, supporters of the socialist Red Army, were in the crosshairs of the imperial White Army. Her life would have been forfeit and so would her future children's had an uncle who had emigrated and lived at that time in the United States not sponsored her and her sisters' passage to Canada.