Why I Find Celia Compelling

I could have written this about myself:

By the time I was five I had read the equivalent of what a fairly bright child would get through in their entire primary school education, and by the time I was ten I had read a similar amount as a person would have read by the time they were twenty. The local juvenile library was supposed to provide for readers up to the age of sixteen, and I had exhausted it before I was eleven, supplementing it with what adults at that time read for fun, as found in my grandfather’s library.

This part of Politeness Is Bourgeois. Of course, I came up at a slightly later time, and by that time there was plenty of egalitarian as well as downright inappropriate literature to be had at my local library. Still, armed with a milk crate, and knowing the extent of Mom's censorship would be a banning of books with objectionable covers, I read far, far more than most people do in a lifetime.

The quality of the literature may have been poorer, coming up as I did in the 80s and therefore being exposed to a lot of 60s and 70s drivel, but curiously I still came to similar conclusions about freedom.