Growing up in a hyper-religious ultra-conservative old-time pentecostal preacher’s home, the only place I found to call my own without fearing ridicule for my ridiculous crewcut and out-of-style clothing, in the rebellious world of the seventies where bell bottoms, tie-dyed t-shirts, and long hair were everything, was the library. I felt so different, out-of-place, and weird at school, yet I could always find a place among the books to call my own.

It felt like home—a place without secrets. And if you grew up religious, you grow to think that secrets are the key to survival. Yet the authentic characters I discovered in the books somehow gave me comfort and hope that I, too, could one day be honest with myself.

I became a voracious reader at the age of four and am still an insatiable reader six decades later. So instead of asking the age-old question, “Who’s your favorite author?” I want to ask, “What kind of reader are you?” I daresay you may never have given that idea much thought. So let me help you by telling you what I might say. And if my ways seem sacrilegious to you, I apologize in advance.

If I do not have a bookmark or dust flap, I turn the top corners down. I fold pages inward to mark an essential passage if I don’t have a pencil or a marker handy. Marginalia fills the books that I fall in love with or lust after. If it is a Kindle version, my copious notes are inevitably truncated. What a despicable thought—truncation in a land of infinite digital space. Inexcusable, Mr. Bezos.

Yes, damn it, I do read books on Kindle. I am not a purist. Particularly when I’m traveling, the days of my sagging under a backpack of heavy books are over. I will never forget the moment I realized one could download almost any text in the world on this miraculous instrument. Sequestered in a wilderness cabin high in the Colorado Rockies with no library for hundreds of miles, I could access a neighbor’s wifi and download my precious companions. Emerson said it well, we are not solitary while we read and write, though no one is with us.

But never fear my nostalgic reader; nothing feels like caressing the musty pages and excellent leather of an old-fashioned physical book while exploring the unexpected and often banned worlds within. A lifelong dream was to stay in a mountain cabin with heavy snow falling, cuddled on a leather couch with a beautiful woman, in front of a blazing fire for a week with nothing to do except read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Well, maybe one other thing. I will be forever indebted to my friend Mike Woolley for making that dream a better reality than I could have imagined.

I read four or five books at once. Escapist fiction at bedtime, creative inspiration in the morning, philosophy at noon, and erotica in the afternoon. Reading is the only thing in the world at which I can efficiently multitask. I ALWAYS take a book with me if I suspect there will be more than a sixty-second wait: the doctor and dentist’s office, any dreaded government agency, or a boring lecture.

Goals are essential to my reading. Currently, I am reading Pulitzer-prize-winning books hoping the aura of genius will penetrate my being. I am also working through the ten-year reading list in the exquisite book “The Joy of Reading,” having resigned that it will undoubtedly take me at least twenty years. And I have determined to read and collect as many banned and censored books as possible. In addition, I am filling my atelier/library with as many books as I can remember reading during life. When someone walks in and asks the inevitable question, “How many of these have you read?” I wish to quietly answer, “all of them.”

I could go on, but I would love to hear your answer. If you have dared read a long post about reading in the millisecond world of social networks, I earnestly desire to hear from you. I bared my mind; now your turn, “What kind of reader are you?”