Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
On reading
I’ve been thinking about Dean’s comment to yesterday’s post — how my life has taken such a different trajectory in this regard. I used to be an avid reader, too. When I was a grade schooler, I would check out eight or nine books from the library and I’d cycle through them, reading each one until I tired of it, going to the next, and eventually finishing them all. This drove my dad a little nuts, since he’s one of these OCD start, finish, then move on types. He couldn’t figure out how I managed to keep all the plots straight.
Then high school happened, and while I remember reading for fun during summer vacation (Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive comes to mind . . . not sure why), I was usually too busy during the school year to do much pleasure reading. I have a dim memory of Dune, and Watership Down, and countless science fiction novels, but I think those happened during junior high. In Eight Grade, old Bud Camfield convinced me to start reading the classics. And while Crime and Punishment was a worthwhile experience, it wasn’t exactly pleasure reading.
It only got worse after college. The one novel I recall reading for “pleasure” was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which left me hollow and depressed and convinced that I and my whole family were doomed. Yes, I think I had forgotten how to read for pleasure. (Oh, wait! There were Stephen Donaldson’s horrendous fantasies, Lord Foul’s Bane and the like. Tried to reread that one a few years back, couldn’t make it past the first page.)
And it just kept getting worse, what with med school and then (worst of all) internship and residency. I recall reading exactly one book for pleasure during residency: when Karen and I vacationed in Hawaii, I reread Heart of Darkness. Light fare indeed.
Then I got out of residency and started teaching, and I discovered William S. Burroughs and John Le Carre, Robert Graves and Roald Dahl. Maybe it was Dahl that got me out of my serious rut, led me to Doug Adams, then Terry Pratchett, and eventually Christopher Moore.
Dean, if you want to rediscover the joy of reading, you could do no better than to pick up Christopher Moore’s Fool. What a pleasure that one was. I’m currently reading Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, which humor-wise is a much different experience. Enjoyable, but it’s Moore’s fool my mind returns to, wants to spend time with. (The audio version voiced by Euan Morton was spectacular, by the way.)
And stay away from Cormac McCarthy.
D.
I have read Christopher Moore, actually, although not Fool. I picked up one of the early ones (Island of the Sequined Love Nun? no, earlier than that – The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, I think) on a whim and enjoyed it.
I have been reading for pleasure, just not much – I’m partway through Martin’s Game of Thrones set (you can’t call them trilogies), and I’m reading Life, by Keith Richards.
It’s partly that I’m out of the habit, and partly that I have so much going on that by the time I get a few minutes, it’s just before bedtime and I wind up falling asleep.
Plus I can’t find the Martin I was reading.. it’s somewhere in one of those goddam boxes.
If you liked Lust Lizard, you really ought to try his other stuff. Lust Lizard is one of his weakest, IMO. Island of the Sequined Love Nun was great.