We were not allowed books as children. My mother felt that learning made a child willful and prone to violence, and saw to it that reading materials were kept as far from her offspring as she could muster. And she was exacting, with eyes like a torch at dawn, blistering away the fog that might be thrown up to confound her.

Though, it must be said that however sharp her eyes were, the woman had short arms. The top shelf was beyond her reach, and therefore beyond her purview. So it was there my siblings and I stashed out bounty of words and phrases, scrabbling up the shelves like monkeys so that we might learn how to me more than mere apes.

My favorite book of these purloined and hidden gems will always be Hypatia's HISTORIES AND LIES. Hypatia never differentiated between the two, which is where she and I part ways.