Joseph Forster—a good strong name for a good strong man. At age three, attempts to read were thwarted by difficulty with the ABCs and the incorrigible insertion of the mysterious letter "kee,"much to his mother's dismay. She didn't throttle him, however, and when reading was finally learned young Joseph joined Christian Supply's reading program and won all the possible prizes. He read a lot of Redwall books between the ages of 7-12. All of them, in fact.
Then he grew up and stopped reading fiction. This devastating period lasted till he was eighteen years old. Count them—six years without fiction. In the absence of fiction, however, our resourceful hero made his own, reenacting himself the history he read in books. Of course this tendency existed before the Great Fiction Famine (he fought the Battle of Lexington at age 5, a Medieval feast at 7, the American Civil War at 17), and was fueled by his parents' love of history and historical fiction—they read Gone With the Wind aloud as a bedtime story.
The Civil War and World War II are particular favorites: growing up, Mr. Forster devoured veritable tomes about these periods, filling his head with weird things like Knowledge, Ideas and Stuff. Securing employment at Exodus was accompanied by the realization of how much Great Literature our hero had not read, though that is becoming less the case. He likes books with lots of evil in them (1984, Brave New World and Lord of the Flies), though, despite this and his swarthy appearance, he is genuinely a Nice Guy.
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