On Becoming a Reader

I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was eleven years old. I was no stranger to stories (I watched Sky King and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, after all) and spent a great amount of time inventing my own, just for something to do. (“Me Time” we had in abundance before 24/7 TV and TikTok.) My epiphany came when I invented a story so amazing, so thrilling, and so unique that I had to write it down.

It involved a man who crashes his plane into the jungle. Then a second man, coming to rescue him, crashes his plane as well. They are trapped, stranded atop a cliff, with hostile natives to contend with. In desperation, they combine the parts of both planes to make one functioning aircraft and take off just in the nick of time. It was thrilling, it was a blockbuster. It was—I found out much later—the same plot as The Flight of the Pheonix, a 1965 novel by Elleston Trevor.

My story was written in 1966.

This was clearly a case of synchronicity, or people coming up with similar ideas at the same time. Plagiarism it was not, and I know this because I didn’t read.

I continue to find it amazing that, when I was young, although I had enjoyed the books Mom read to me as a toddler, and I seriously wanted to be a writer, I found reading boring and pointless. I’d pick up a book, look at all the pages between the covers, and think, “Who has this much time to waste that they want to read all those words?”

What amazes me even more is, around this time, I discovered a book (Fantastic Voyage by Issac Asimov) and could not believe how thrilling and interesting it was.

As a result, I either:

A)        decided I needed to devour more science fiction adventure books, especially ones by Issac Asimov and people like him, and thereafter became a dedicated reader

or

B)        decided that I had somehow found the only book in the entire history of the world worth reading, so I re-read it over and over and never thought to read anything else

Yeah. B. I mean, really, are you surprised?

During my early academic career, I used deception to write book reports on books I never read, and gleaned information from class discussions to get passable grades on our assigned reading. In looking back, I think, why not just read the fucking book? It would take less effort. This has convinced me that time travel will never become possible in my lifetime because, if it did, then when I was 13 or 14, I would have been startled by an old man bursting into my bedroom, grabbing me by the collar and slapping me around the head, yelling, “Read! For fuck’s sake, read!” and then stalking out, shouting, “And don’t buy Betamax!” as he disappeared into the night.

And yet.

And yet, I wrote. I wrote poems (less said, the better) and essays and stories and, by the time I was in high school, was known as the kid who could help you out in English Class by giving you an original story to hand in for the “Write a Short Story” assignment that everyone hated. And again, in looking back, the teachers must have known. It was a small (ish) school, and all those kids handing in stories written in the same style must have raised an eyebrow or two. Maybe they were as lazy as I was. That being the case, I would have slapped them as well while I was back in 1969.

That I finally became a reader—however belatedly—was down to my mom. She was a voracious reader and, as mentioned above, read to me when I was little. I’m not sure why she didn’t continue to do so, or encourage me to read on my own, but I assume it had something to do with two younger brothers and a younger sister. By the time I was in high school, however, she was done having babies, and had enough time on her hands that I could give her the book I was assigned, have her read it, and then tell me about it.

This worked well, until it didn’t. At some point, Mom obviously figured out she was doing me more harm than good so, instead of reading the book and telling me about it, she sat me down and read it to me. I can’t say if it was the gripping narrative or the embarrassment of having her read to me that caused me to eventually pick up the book and finish reading it myself, but once I did, I became a reader, and I quickly set about making up for lost time.

Back then, we had a thing called the Doubleday Book Club. The idea was, you signed up, got six books for a dollar, and an extra book if you got a friend to sign up. Then, after a month, they would begin to send you a book every four weeks that you had to pay standard price for. So, what we did was sign up, get six books, sign each other up for the extra book, wait until they all arrived in the mail, then cancel our subscriptions. After reading all the books, we’d do it again. And again.

In this way I got a lot of books for next to nothing. I became a fan of Stephen King, Jack Higgins, James Michener, Anne Rice, and Ken Follett (his early works), and many other authors I enjoyed. Every place I lived had bookcases, and every bookcase was full. My friends and I exchanged books, and one memorable winter afternoon, I walked a mile to my neighbour’s house during a fierce snowstorm to get the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, because I had finished The Fellowship of the Ring and could not possibly wait to read The Two Towers. That’s the mark of a true reader.

And something like that happened only a few years ago: having read The Knife of Never Letting Go—the first book in Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy—and discovering it was a trilogy (I’d thought it was a stand-alone) I walked to the Waterstone’s bookstore to buy the remaining two. Granted it was a nice sunny day, which didn’t require the same amount of dedication and effort, but it proved the passion is still there.