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be heroic orphans. I called skunks polecats and knew that when the time came to put my acquired knowledge into practice, I would be able to identify fool’s gold by pressing it between my teeth.
    I also believed that normal human conversation was conducted in highly expository back-and-forth exchanges of quick wit and hyperbolic dialect:
    â€œAnd what do you think about it, Pop?” Roy asked at length. “Any pronounced opinions on the subject?”
    â€œYou mean about goin’?”
    â€œI mean about the chances of striking gold at Nugget Camp.”
    â€œOh!” The old puncher rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well, if you really want to know, Roy—I think the chances are pretty blame good!”
    These books led to an interest in fanciful history ( The Life of Kit Carson , The Oregon Trail , With Crockett and Bowie: Fighting for the Lone Star Flag ), and then led sort of accidentally to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave , and then by calculated chance to Laura Ingalls Wilder. I may be the only heterosexual boy in Ohio history who not only read all the Little House books, but also as a result took up sewing because the skill seemed absolutely necessary to my survival here on the lone prairie. (Which was actually the twin bed in the room I shared with my late-twentieth-century, middle-class brother.)
    These books, most of them, shared one other common trait. In their opening pages, on that thick cottony paper, were lists of other titles. By 1927, for instance, Arthur M. Winfield had written a “first” Rover Boys series consisting of twenty titles, and a “second” series of ten more, and also, apparently in his downtime, six titles of a Putnam Hall series, which I’d never even seen. This list wasn’t complete. It didn’t mention Winfield’s Bright and Bold series, published in the late nineteenth century, a series at whose scope and breadth I could only guess, because the list on the Poor but Plucky title page indexed a few titles followed by “etc., etc.,” suggesting that Mr. Winfield’s prolificness was best not expressed in finite terms.
    Leo Edwards, meanwhile, had already published eleven books in the Jerry Todd series, plus eight Poppy Ott books, three Trigger Berg books, and four Tuffy Beans. (A previous owner of this copy of Jerry Todd and the Purring Egg had penciled marks next to the titles—check marks and little circles, apparently to indicate those read and those yet to be read, an accounting of desire whose echo carries into the Amazon Wish List.)
    The bit of copy that preceded the list indicated a body of work filled with “Pirates! Mystery! Detectives! Adventure! Ghosts! Buried Treasure! Achievement!”
    The list of books in the X Bar X Boys series ended with a preemptive strike: “Other volumes in preparation.”
    Books were being written everywhere, at every hour of the day and night, in the mystery of creation, but with such speed and efficiency that they could not be accounted for by anything but the promise that they would come, they would come, they would come. Mystery! Adventure! Buried Treasure! Achievement! Etc.!
    All of this combined to make two things quite clear, both of which were ultimately depressing.
    1. I would never be able to read all the books.
    2. If I wanted to be a writer, I was already dreadfully far behind.
    *  *  *
    The idea of choices was complicated in the industrial Midwest.
    It wasn’t just that this was a land of plenty. It specifically was a land of plenty for a newly mature and uniquely American set of consumers, a deeply nuanced middle class that begged for equally nuanced ways to indulge its proud discretionary income. The suburban shopping mall had almost completely replaced the urban downtown department store, and its concoursed nooks and honey­combs catered to increasingly concise stratifications of patronage. (Think a Chess King