Confessions of a Bibliophile

[TranquillityBase]

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As far back as I go is the Tar Baby story.
- I think this is a rather problematic line, Tar Baby opens up a world of sticky unpleasantness that I don't think this poem needs. What is the unpleasantness?  Racial overtones?  

Also, the analogy fails at the end. Tar Babies (as I understand it) are traps, not escapes (in the story the escape is the 'briar patches' combined with 'cleverness').  Yeah, you've got me there.  It violates the logic of the original story. But it makes a sort of sense in that I'm compelled to grab onto the written word. 
It isn't a very conversational or engaging opening. Close though

Third graders like me
Not interested in the 'like me'.  OK
..................................heard Miss Sanko read
'heard' is very passive, and doesn't work well with the apparent revelation of the experience.  Check double check
The Wheel on the School. A switch was flipped
OK, which is it? Tar Baby or The Wheel on the School? Feels like you're starting twice. Why?  I did sense this and was thinking of making the Tar Baby line (first one) a separate stanza.  I had more about that, because it was being read to me by a relative, an ex-Aunt (ex in that my uncle divorced her, or she him)
Also you've got 'wheel' why then go for 'switch'?
I haven't read (nor heard until now) of this book,   It was an award winning children's book in the 1960s.  How soon the world forgets!
and I no longer knelt to change TV channels
a switch was flipped an so you stopped flipping switches?  OK, need to work on that, switch in my brain, channel changer on TV
but to run fingers along lettered spines.
feels (linguistically) like it's from a different poem. It's trying too hard.

S2.
 It feels too much like a list, Yep it is a list.  You really don't like lists, do you? 

where's the 'phile' of the 'bibliophile'?  I thought I was expressing that, but I guess not

And, out of absolutely nowhere, you end with Beowulf! Darn it!

Lastly, what are you confessing to?  I was trying to show the wandering way I moved from classic lit (for children) through pulp lit and finally on to real lit (my definition of it anyway)

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Thanks Knot.  Onward through the fog, as they used to say in the sixties.
TqB