Sister Mary Joanna was four feet nine. She was a Sister of Notre Dame. It would be many years before I understood that she had nothing to do with the Fighting Irish football team, the Four Horsemen or “Touchdown Jesus.” For that matter, it would take a long time for me to figure out why they called her “sister,” because I had four sisters at home and they weren’t even close to the same thing. She spoke broken English (it might have been broken Italian). She had a pretty impressive black mustache, only a day or two from the combing and trimming stage (for this we labeled her Mister Joanna, even though we knew that mocking God’s sister might trigger a natural disaster).

As was customary with this bunch from Notre Dame, she dressed head to toe in black. Hard black dress shoes like those worn by someone just out of leg braces, a black dressy skirt thing with what looked like black baseball sleeves and a black jersey over it. It was all topped off by what could only be described as a black hood meets veil meets skullcap meets bank robbery disguise. More suited to an ebony mime, the headgear covered ears, neck, hair—leaving an oval just big enough to frame the eyes and the promising mustache. It was like being taught by a creepy penguin with an Italian accent.

She was my fourth-grade teacher, and things seemed to be going okay until, without warning and unprovoked, Sister Joanna spits out a string of blended sounds and word fragments that end with the clear phonics: “BOOKA REPORTA.” And she had a “SIGNAUPPA LISTA.” Sister Joanna came armed from the old country with some sort of twisted affection for the book report—that is, a booka reporta. Now she was assigning them to the tune of one a month! We’d go to the little library, pick a book, then put our book on the “sign-up list” (signauppa lista). Apparently, the Italians don’t like the potential for crime that could exist if two or more ten-year-olds did a report on the same book, so there had to be a lista. Then some ridiculously short amount of time later, we were supposed to come back with a handwritten report. In cursive! Five hundred words!

Naturally, this was bad news for a fourth-grader squarely committed to only exerting the bare minimum. But I’m ten, so I figure it will all blow over, maybe it was all just a mix-up that would be sorted out by the Italian authorities. Well, when I get home, my mom knows. SHE KNOWS! EVERYTHING! There must have been some sort of Anglo-Italian telepathy treaty (actually the little-mustachioed one was pretty smart, she sent home a packet that spelled out all the rules). Mom: “So what book are you gonna do your report on, Patrick? You know, you have to pick it from the library tomorrow.” Me: “It doesn’t matter, I can’t read a whole book anyway. There are only like five or six days.” Pops: “Aww come on, you’re a pretty good reader, just pick a subject you like. Pick out a sports book” Me: “What sport do you think would make the shortest book?”

So the next morning we follow Mister Joanna down to the little school library. When we were herded into our “age-appropriate” section it was slim pickings. There couldn’t have been more than 100 titles, mostly books about saints, boys with the last name Hardy and the odd page-turner about fossils or working with your hands. Ten guys were wrestling over the six or so books about sports and when these literary pugilists were pulled apart, I jumped on the one that dropped on the floor.

I really kinda ended up hitting lotto. The book I scooped up like a toddler pouncing on treats pouring out of a piñata was entitled Heroes of Pro Basketball. It was perfectly in my sweet spot, and while I was basically terrified of the mountain that was the book’s 169 pages, it had lots of big pictures and the players that were the subjects of each chapter may as well have been old friends. Jerry West and Oscar Robertson were on the cover, and the stories it contained about George Mikan, West, Elgin Baylor and Wilt Chamberlain (among others) would have been like reading Matthew, Mark, Luke and John for us Lakers fans (see the Catholic thing I did there?) With this book and the nine others just like it in the library, I discovered the secret formula that would become a year’s worth of booka reportas, namely, if you found books about shit you already knew, reading assignments could be completed without ever having to read anything. It was also around this time that I invented the fun fact (introducing the concept in one of my early book reports) when I revealed that Jerry West’s first nickname was Zeke From Cabin Creek, but that he wasn’t from Cabin Creek, West Virginia but from nearby Cheylan. Facts have been around since Hector was a pup, but I put the fun in the fact and if you don’t believe me you can ask Sister Mary Joanna.

♦

We spend a lot of time looking for silly workarounds to avoid doing things, the right things, things that might be good for us, things that might make us grow, things that are difficult, things that might take more time than we are willing to invest. I spent about 40 years finding better things to do than reading. I didn’t read the classics, I didn’t read the latest fiction, I read no literature. I didn’t read about war or politics, world history or philosophy, sex or the priesthood (oops, that was a slip). County fair? Yes! Book fair? No! Live bait? Yes! Bookworms? No!

Gaining knowledge seems like it should be one of life’s main pursuits. If so, I had not pursued it very successfully. My mom had, for several years, been giving me books she thought I’d like for my birthday. I think she thought I was an adult. One was a book by Stephen Ambrose. I had it in my hand; I believe I was contemplating tossing it—it was just taking up space. Instead, I turned the cover. I read the introduction without thought, probably the first time I read twenty continuous pages of anything in my life. I stopped, looked around, took inventory—nobody got hurt during my act of literacy. It hit me, the easiest way to get smart is reading. It’s the perfect crime, you don’t really need to do anything, just read about people who did. And then the knowledge that they may have strained, paid or died for you can claim as your own. So I just flipped, right then, in a day, from a nonreader to a nonstop reader. In the field of mind expansion, books leave reefer in the dust.

In the past five years, I have read 486 books. I started out with physical hardcovers then began mainlining with a Kindle. As in my days with Sister Mary Joanna, though, after a month or two, I was having trouble recalling the facts that I really dug when I first read them. So I started taking notes. I recorded line after line in a Snoopy Moleskine. The average little Snoopy Moleskine can hold about 1,018 entries. I call these my fun fact books (I’m on my second one), but in reality, most of the facts aren’t that fun; rather, what I write down in Snoopy’s presence is anything that gee-whizzes me, running the gamut from inspirational to incredible to that’s so completely fucked up. When every page of that first Moleskine was filled, I went back to it. I had noted, in really sloppy printing, some really funny things by funny people, lots of powerful historical facts, a good amount of stuff that now seems unimportant, quotes and lyrics and turns of phrase that grabbed me, bits and pieces and artifacts about subjects I’d always wondered about, and in the end, what amounts to a hodge-podge of irresistible, jewel-like truths I was born to unearth. If you read every day and take note of the bright shiny objects hiding in the margins and spaces, then, for all practical purposes, you’d be learning something new every day.

I find this a perfectly noble goal.