Books he read and then gave her that she got more out of than him. When friends seemed to intimate to him she was pretty or beautiful but not too smart he said “She’s a much better reader than I. You should see her. Books I had trouble with, sometimes had to work hard to finish, she winged through and had insights into I never approached. Her intelligence is natural; she’s shortchanged herself in not going through and past high school, but you can’t say she doesn’t speak well.” She said she couldn’t stand poetry, it wasn’t that she didn’t get it, though some of it no one could get; it was that most of it was useless and precious and made for fairies or textbooks and she was ashamed whenever he took a book of poems along with him when they went out, except the ones in both English and German or French or Spanish, because then people would think he was just trying to learn the language. “As for the others — keep them in your pocket, read them in the car in secret or when you’re alone on the bus or just at home, but don’t take them out in restaurants while we’re waiting for a table or on the movie line. If you have to read anything at those places, why not history or stick with your good fiction, though to really please me I wish you’d take to books on investing money or how to repair my house.”
