By Rachel Holcomb
Monroe Public Library
This month’s Cover-to-Cover interview is with Greg Holcomb. Greg was born and raised in Monroe. He attended UW-Madison and graduated from UW-Whitewater with a Masters in Education. He worked for Green County for 30 years, retiring last June as the Director of Human Services, and now spends most of his time traveling and reading in the sun. He is currently working his way through the entire Stephen King oeuvre.
What are you reading?
I’m working on two books right now. Stephen King’s “The Shining,” for the first time. I just watched the movie for probably about the third or fourth time and knew from a fact going into it that the books are always a lot better than the movie, so I’m really enjoying this right now.
And I’m also, just to break up the fiction stuff, reading “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.” It’s a non-fiction book by Tom O’Neill. He spent about 20 years writing it, putting it together. It talks about Charles Manson, obviously, and the murders and a lot of the CIA and the government’s experimentation with LSD in the late ‘60s, and mind control and how that might have been wrapped around the Manson family and Hollywood and that sort of thing. I’ve read that before, I think last summer, but I’m re-reading it again. It was one of the first books I probably read when I retired. “The Shining” is the 31st Stephen King book I’ve read since June, when I retired. I think I have about a dozen King books left that I’d like to read.
Retirement well spent so far.
Indeed. I spend a lot of time reading here at the library, sitting in front of the big windows in the sun. I get more sun here than I can at home, and so it makes it really nice.
What book or literary character inspires you?
I read mostly for enjoyment and recreation; I always have. But I was talking to somebody the other day about one book that I’ll probably never forget as long as I live. It was just a small paperback. I read it on the bus when I was in graduate school, back and forth from one side of Madison to the other. It was called “The Eden Express” by Mark Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut’s son. It was written in 1975 as basically an autobiography of his trip into mental illness, schizophrenia to be precise. He was basically a hippie that went west and got sick along the way. His writing was so spectacular. He took you on the trip with him, and it’s just as scary as Stephen King can be, or more so. I pull that out as one paperback from my college days that I probably never got rid of. That inspired me, that he was able to acknowledge that himself, talk about in the way he did, let the reader live it the way he was unfortunately having to live it, and then come out at the end OK. I picked it up primarily because it was Kurt Vonnegut’s son and I read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut in my college days and enjoyed that as well.
What was your favorite book growing up?
That is both hard and easy. I think I read a good majority of the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. Tom Swift, I think those were originally written in 1910, and the Hardy Boys started in the ‘30s. I liked those up to the late ‘50s. Of course then the publisher started to rewrite them all, to take the stereotypes out of there and such, not that that was a bad thing. The new ones didn’t make fun of Chet as much as they did in the old days though, because he was always described as portly and chubby, for example. But a couple of good friends of mine growing up were Tom Swift fans and Hardy Boys fans too, and so we got to swap books back and forth.
Also, the Weekly Reader’s Children Book Club in the late ‘50s. I was in grade school and we all got signed up through our third grade class or whatever. I was probably 9 years old or something to that effect. Then we’d get to order books and they would come — Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, another one I’ll probably never forget. That was about 1958 or so. That’s primarily what I read as a child. I loved books. They were always around. But those were the ones I always gravitate to, and I still look at them on the shelf or in the antique stores when I’m in there because they’re so good.
Were your parents readers or did they have books in the house?
No. But I was a big fan of the library at the time. It was right across the street from the current library then, and I loved the school library of course, and like I said, the Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club. I was not an only child, but my brother and sister had grown up quite some time before me and moved on, and so I was alone and had to have something to do, so reading became one of the things. And I think I passed that along to my kids a little bit, or somehow my kids picked up on that, because they both became quite the readers, and one of them became a librarian.
If you could be a character in a book that you’ve read who would it be? Because you read a lot of Stephen King, you might not want to be a character in those! Perhaps portly Chet?
Portly Chet? Ha, no. Probably Frank Hardy, if anybody. He was the one that wasn’t ever getting into trouble like his brother Joe. He was cool. He wasn’t always flying off the handle like Joe. But we always wanted to be a Hardy Boy I think when we were young, or we wanted to be somebody like Tom Swift. That was our world back then. We didn’t have much television or movies. We weren’t personally into superhero comic books or anything.
Tell us about a book that you were disappointed in, or that you were looking forward to that you didn’t like.
Boy, I probably have a lot of books that I had gotten at the library and taken back way before I ever got close to the end. Some of the buzzy stuff. One that comes to my mind, and I had to buy my own copy because I was going to do some traveling and I just wanted my paperback. It has to be a bigger paperback, I can’t read the little ones anymore, but I like paperbacks. I don’t like the Kindles or anything like that. I’ve got to have a book, and especially a new book that smells like a new book. But “The Girl on the Train,” I had to have that book. Everyone had to have that book. People said once you pick it up you can’t put it down. Well, I couldn’t pick it up. Every time I picked it up, I put it down and I couldn’t get back to it, so it’s somewhere in my closet probably in pristine condition. Then the movie came out and that cinched it for me, because in my mind the movie was terrible, and it’s like I probably didn’t miss the book at all. But a lot of people did enjoy it. I was disappointed in that, I remember that for a fact.
If you were stranded on a desert island with one book, what would you want it to be?
I’ve seen this question come up before. When people ask this it’s like, oh boy ... The first thing you think of is maybe “Robinson Crusoe,” maybe there’s some good ideas in there. But I’ve never read that either and I don’t know if that’s any good or not.
I think I’d want it to be a big book that I get wrapped up in and totally enjoy. When I think of that I think about what seems like one of my best friends in the last couple of months or so which is “The Stand” by Stephen King. The uncut version that came out ... I’m not sure when it came out, but he included an extra 300 or 400 pages in this version that the original publisher made him edit out. King does what he does best and expands on his character development and his scene setups and all that. It’s about 1,150-1,200 pages long. I’ve never read a book that long probably in my life, but when I was done with that it was like losing a friend. I bought my own copy and carried that around with me, I took it on trips and that sort of thing and I just read it and I just couldn’t put it down.
Do you have anything else that you’d like to add?
I enjoy this library immensely. I enjoy reading. I haven’t always had the time or taken the effort, especially before I retired. But now — I don’t know what I’ll do once I get past Stephen King, but the sun will always be out and I’ll be doing something along these lines.
— Cover to Cover is provided by the Monroe Public Library and is published monthly in the Times.
