First of all, I caught lectomania (my coinage for the insatiable desire to read) before the dawn of television. Nothing since – especially television – has convinced me to seek a cure.

It is probably the fact that I don't read what I'm supposed to read that keeps me from being a truly well-educated man. I'm not choosy about what I read. It can be a two-week-old daily newspaper, an out-of-print manual about how to maintain a Model T Ford, the cover of Reader's Digest or the entire English translation of the operatic libretto for "La Forza del' Destino."

This lack of reading discipline caused serious problems when I was in school. Somehow I never was interested in the assigned required reading. While everyone in class was dissecting Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment," I was slowly meandering through Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams." When the teacher told us to bring in a report on "The Last of the Mohicans," I was off romping through Hannibal, Mo. with Mark Twain.

Eventually, I got around to the utterly depressing Russian novelists and the dreadful James Fenimore Cooper, but it was long after the term papers were graded. I usually managed a passing or better grade, however, because I looked the authors up in the encyclopedia and quickly spliced together enough information to fool at teacher.

Even today, I never read the books on the best seller lists until after they are no longer best sellers and everyone at the cocktail party is discussing something else.

One consistent trait of my inveterate lectomania is that I will go on binges with certain authors or a particular style of writing. A few years ago, I read everything that F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote, including some obscure works that cause the always helpful librarian to wince. I also read everything that his less-than-literary wife, Zelda, wrote. And I read all that I could find which had been written about the two of them. I suppose I could have written my own book about the Fitzgeralds and the Lost Generation except that I didn't take notes, my memory isn't that good and the line between research and plagiarism can be mighty fuzzy.

Once, I developed a fascination for science fiction and went through dozens of the startling literary creations of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and other writers of the futurism genre.

Another persistent symptom of my reading disease is the inherent ability to completely lock out the rest of the world while I'm concentrating on a book or newspaper. A family member or associate may yell my name six or seven times before I finally lift my head with a quizzical and slightly irritated, "Are you talking to me?"

I regret not being among those readers who know what they like and stick to it. Or those who simply read what provides them the information needed to function better in life. They can go out and buy their mysteries, head for the library and pick up a romance novel or join the western book club. I have to limit my visit to libraries and bookstores because I find myself running from section to section, hoping not to miss a volume of something that strikes my momentary fantasy. It could be a 380-page tome on the archeology of Pompeii on sale for $1.50, a forgotten novel by Bram Stoker or "The Collected Wit of George Ade." However, none of them seems to slake the unquenchable thirst of an indiscriminate lectomaniac.