Thoughts

I struggled to read as a child

Read against the machine 15% of my brain

Illustration generated with ChatGPT by OpenAI, prompted and selected by Greg Conrad Smith, 2026.

I struggled to read as a child. I could follow the directions to build an Estes model rocket, but I had difficulty comprehending long-form texts. In second grade I was frustrated with a paperback novel whose cover art included a space station.¹ I was intrigued by the wheel-like structure that suggested rotation, centrifugal forces, and artificial gravity, but I could not understand the story. The process of reading was exhausting. I was hyperactive, easily distracted, and prone to skipping pages. This ill-conceived reading strategy persisted through middle school. My first reading of The Lord of the Rings avoided geographical details and descriptions of battles. I finished Tolkien’s trilogy under the misapprehension that Sauron and Saruman were two names for the same person.

Today, some 50 years later, I am well-read for someone with a technical background, but I remain easily overwhelmed by information when I cannot discern its pattern. I have a preference for texts that are dense and conceptually rich, such as poetry and expository mathematics.

1. I remember the title as Exile Earth, but this may be incorrect. It was not the first book of Ben Bova’s Exile Trilogy. It was much smaller. ↩