Doing a little reading is good for the soul…….

Don’t know what turned me into such a reader, and, ultimately, a writer. And although I’ve not read much fiction over the last number of years, when I was younger, I was a totally voracious reader who devoured huge stacks of books in seemingly endless fashion. There were not a lot of books around our home when I was growing up. We had a few – like a 1912 edition of “Titanic” that might be worth something today if it’d survived – and my Dad, who only had Grade 8, tried taking a correspondence course the one time – he never finished it but we ended up with a few of the books from it kicking around – one called, “The Cruel Sea”, which I never did read.

Anyway, as soon as I able – which was likely after we moved into town when I was eight – I started frequenting the Hanover Public Library, and, indeed, I spent quite a large amount of time there as a youngster and checked out lots and lots of books, starting with stuff like the Hardy Boys and gradually working my way all the up into Hemingway and Steinbeck and the sort of big guys. I just sort of couldn’t get enough reading material when I was young. I just loved to read.

Remember that, for some reason, my friend, Glen, had a copy of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich hanging out in his room at the Queen’s, and I think I read it when I was about 14 and it really opened up my world and gave me a real insight into the world conflict that happened only a scant 20 years earlier. Remember when I was coming of age and reading books like Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye (which I must admit I don’t think really had a profound effect on me) and into the futuristic sci-f stuff like Brave New World, Farenheit 451, 1984, Animal Farm……..

It’s funny, too, because Hanover had no book store when I was a young guy. In fact, it’s a true story that the only place in town where you could buy a book in the old days was the pool room…..that’s right, folks…skin magazines and great literature – side by side….I remember this vividly because of my experience with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Bought The Hobbit at the pool room and breezed through it, went back and bought the first two Lord of the Rings books. Devoured them – blown away – gobsmacked, as everyone keeps saying these days……Had to…..had to….had to have the third book…The Return of the King…..dashed back up to the pool room….Yikes…..no book….not in stock….Immediately hit the side of the road, thumb protruded, heading for Kitchener to acquire the book…..home again, home again fast as I can….

Had a true life altering experience near the end of my somewhat checkered high school career…….got involved in helping start a sort of underground newspaper at the school and my role as editor perhaps shaped most of the rest of my life. But, also, as part of the whole newspaper experience, I ended up in an independent reading course with a very progressive and  innovative teacher and that also changed me forever…..while the rest of my classmates were reading the stock stuff of high school, I was delving into Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe and Buckminster Fuller and all of the greatest contemporary writers of the age….while at the same time, continuing my journeys into the past with the Russian guys and the English women and Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson…..

I continued to read relentlessly through early adulthood, which I spent most of at university. Remember being at the University of Guelph for a summer semester when things are a little less hectic. I was up wandering around the Library in the English section one day early in the semester, and I spotted this huge row of Charles Dickens’ works. Why not, I thought……so, over the course of the summer, I read as much Dickens as the library had to offer…. Very, very enjoyable….

Then, sort of tragically, when I was in my early thirties, I pretty much stopped reading fiction. It coincided with my early beginnings as a creative writer. When I started to write my short stories, I decided that I needed to have my own “voice”…..that I did not want to “sound” or “read” like anybody else on the planet…..I have never studied creative writing or even taken any formal English courses beyond about Grade 11. In university, I took history and politics – not English….When I first started writing my short stories, I wasn’t even sure they were “legitimate” short stories….didn’t know if there were rules you were supposed to follow…..so I sort of made stuff up as I went along…..created my work in isolation, away from other writers. Obsessed with having my own “voice”……

Don’t know if young people today read like I once did….would be nice to think they somehow did, even with all the technology currently swamping them….I just think it opens up your world in so many ways……I hope people have really been reading during the pandemic….it’s good for the soul…..