From X to His First Mystery Novel

 

Photo by Ishaq Robin on Unsplash

My wife was invited to speak at a fundraiser a few weeks ago for a literacy program run in a small town here in North Carolina. I tagged along because I’d never been to that particular part of the state, and because my role in these dramas is to carry the nuclear football.

A few hours before Denise was to go on, the organizers asked us to meet with a group of people at the used bookstore their program runs. The store was a small, cozy spot located on a sleepy Main Street.

Within the memories of people who are much younger than me, the factories in this area that used to employ most of the citizens shipped jobs overseas. What remains are a military base, a vegetable canning plant, meat packing plants, and slaughterhouses. Many of the hams and turkeys destined for American holiday tables are cranked out in this county.

I expected to breeze through the shop for a brief show and tell. But no. When we walked into the bookstore, I was stunned to see a group of people sitting in a giant circle in front of the bookshelves, while the checkout counter had been stocked with an abundance of water bottles, fruit, and snacks.

I was not expecting a party. But that’s what they had planned for.

One by one, people took turns introducing themselves and explaining how the nonprofit literacy program was making a difference in their lives.

The youngest people there—the bookshop’s interns—were students at the local community college. They loved working at the store. They were glad to be given the chance to work in some capacity in retail. Some alluded to being held back in their dreams because of their disabilities. They did not share the nature of those disabilities, and the reporter in me had taken a leave of absence that afternoon, preferring to just listen.

One young man told us that he hoped to attend culinary school someday. He was already whipping up batches of candied brittle at home. “It’s good,” he said. “It’s got great flavor and it doesn’t stick to your teeth.” Some of the people in the program were helping him research how to take his products direct to customers.

At the store, much of the interns’ work days consisted of sorting the used books that donors brought in, researching the titles, setting aside the occasional choice rare-book picks for online sales, and stocking the shelves with books in the best condition, which the shop felt would sell quickly.

Everyone hated dealing with ex-library books. Too many stickers! Ironically, ex-libs in relatively good shape were often the first to get snapped up by buyers because they were cheap and their dust jackets had been long protected by those plastic covers.

The older folks had a different story.

Mr. Sam, who was in his seventies, was a thin, wiry Black man dressed in blue jeans, an ornate brass belt buckle, and a baseball cap.

Ages ago, when he’d gotten his first job, Mr. Sam didn’t know what to do with his first paycheck. He took it to a bank, where a teller instructed him to sign the back. When he told the person behind the counter that he didn’t know how to write his name, he was told to simply write an X.

This he did for decades until very recently, when one of the literacy volunteers helped him learn how to write his first and last name. At first, those were the only things he could write—the only things he needed to write—to conduct his personal business.

There was another adult learner in the group, but she was not as loquacious as Mr. Sam. For several minutes he explained how he managed to get by in the world without knowing how to read. Street signs were a mystery, so he listened carefully when someone gave him directions, and did exactly as he was told. That’s how he got around on foot in town and any place he ever visited. Behind the wheel of a car, he did the same, memorizing and following verbal instructions to the word until the places he needed to go were ingrained in his mind. He did not have much use for road signs, and often got lost in strange places. He knew, for example, that the red sign meant STOP. In supermarkets, he stuck to brands whose packaging he recognized by sight.

Based on his age, I guess he might have had kids or grandkids. Did they read? Did they help him figure out the meaning of the words he encountered in his everyday life, but could not decipher?

I don’t know.

As he spoke, I found myself thinking how many books, how many words, I’d consumed in childhood alone. I remember learning to sound out words for the first time in first grade. But what came after—the plodding steps that led to reading a book on my own for the first time—are lost to me. My identity from early on was so entwined with reading and writing that I cannot imagine not having those skills. I first read for fun, later for work, and now for both.

Hearing Mr. Sam’s story made the struggle real.

Some of the literacy volunteers who had helped Mr. Sam attended this meeting in the bookstore. They were former teachers, recent retirees from the public school system, who wanted to make a difference with their newfound free time.

They had taught him and the other adults the alphabet, how to write those letters and form words, and finally how to write their first and last names.

Mr. Sam was now in the process of reading his first novel from start to finish. A “big” book, he said smiling. For grownups.

It was a mystery novel, and it was sooo good.

After working their way through children’s books, the volunteers liked to start their charges with something in this genre because, as Mr. Sam explained, “The way it’s written, you just want to keep reading to find out how it ends!”

I was choked up by this point, but when he said that, I burst out laughing. Probably a little too loudly.

“How long has it been since you’re been learning all this?” Denise asked him.

“Four years.”

“So, in four years you went from signing your name with an X to reading a novel?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Mr. Sam, who is 77 years old.

It was a nice visit. Eventually, we all moved on to snacks, and later, hugs.

We needed to get back to where we were staying to get ready for the evening program. If the rest of the afternoon and night had not been so mapped out, I think we would have stuck around longer. The store was cute, with sculptures of a tree and jungle animals in the children’s section. And the people were inspiring.

Later, at the fundraiser, some of the store’s interns were running a rare-book silent auction at the back of the room. When the aspiring chef saw me, he reached out to fist-bump me.

I asked if I could take a picture of him and his colleagues.

They were cool with it, and stood up from their post.

“Smile and say brittle,” I said.

They laughed as I snapped away.

On the long ride home the next day, I thought about the experience in the context of the larger national conversation about literacy. Some months ago, I saw (as many of you probably did) the troubling August 2026 story in The Atlantic that argued that the age of reading is dead.

When I first started paging through the article by Rose Horowitch, I expected to be able to dismiss it easily. Yet, unlike so many of the stories of this type, it turned out to be short on fluff or manufactured hysteria. No—what made it so chilling were the brutal statistics.

And yes, the writer noted that we have more bookstores today than a few years ago. But she also writes:

Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told me.

Without reading, humans find it hard to think abstractly or comprehend difficult concepts. And when it’s so easy to watch a video, scroll through headlines, or listen to a podcast or a rant in a social media short, why would you choose to read complex text to make sense of your world?

But you are incapable of making that choice if you cannot read in the first place. So I guess I found it comforting that the human craving for story can still drive that desire. I left that town greatly moved by our short visit to the bookstore on Main Street. And equally proud that our genre still evokes such a strong reaction from new readers:

“The way it’s written, you just want to keep reading to find out how it ends!”

Yes, Mr. Sam, yes! That’s exactly what mysteries do! Long may they ever.

***

You may encounter a paywall if you try to read The Atlantic story. Contact me offline and I may be able to help.

This article brought to mind one of my favorite essays on childhood reading, by Anna Quindlen. You can read "Enough Bookshelves" here.

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com