Books

I have for most of life been a voracious reader. Ever since I was a kid, I measured my self-worth by the number of books I read; a shy, introverted and highly anxious child, I made books (and television) my best friends. I remember when I was about eight or nine I found a girl in my year who I suspected might read as much as I did did; I became extremely jealous of her. She was impinging on my claim to distinction, to specialness. I could possibly write the story of my life by listing the books I've read and, in a way, that's what I want to do a little in this post.

I can't remember when I first learnt to read but I think it was before I started school. My first love was Tintin comics and I collected them. Early on though I turned to real books. When still young I read the collected works of Lewis Carol (my step-mother had a copy); recently I found a school report from when I was in about Standard Two (Year Four) advising my parents to encourage me to read books "more appropriate to my age". I think I read Wild Swans before I was ten although I'm sure I can't have understood it. I know that I read Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Invisible Man when I was still in Primary School because I delivered a speech about them to the school in Standard Three or Four. I was an omnivorous reader, choosing and reading books almost at random.

When I was in Standard Three, one of the two best teachers I have ever had recommended The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. I don't know if my love of Fantasy fiction predated this or not but this book was my favorite for many years. This was a genre at least a little more appropriate to someone of my age. I read and loved Tad Williams, David Eddings, the wonderful Ursula Le Guin (who I still love), all the books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. I would come back to these works over and over again throughout my childhood and adolescence. After a couple of years with virtually no friends, it was through our shared appreciation of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams that I made one, and the bond that I shared with my best friend in Intermediate School was based at least partly on the Dragonlance series.

One author who deserves special mention is Terry Pratchett. The first Discworld novel I read was Mort. During my childhood and adolescence I read each new Pratchett novel as soon as it came out but, as I grew older, I read them more out of a sense of duty or nostalgia than out of enjoyment, and eventually I stopped reading them altogether. Pratchett was producing Discworld novels right up until his death last year. Personally, I think Pratchett peaked with his eighth Discworld novel Guards, Guards: after that his books gradually lost their edge, the blackly skewed often violent absurdism that characterized the early works, an example of this retreat being how, in his first books, the wizards were all homicidal maniacs bent on murdering each other but, by his later books, they had transformed into stereotypical university dons, absent minded and basically benevolent. Another example of Pratchett's decline is the way Captain Vimes, the hero of Guards, Guards, begins as a cynical and alcoholic loser but in later books becomes a competent and one dimensionally diligent police detective who might have stepped straight out of The Bill. In his later books, Pratchett lost touch with the wild Fantastic imagination that had created a flat world in the first place, eschewing dark irony for simplistic social comment. He lost touch with the well-spring of his humor. Still though he was very important to me when I was young.

In Intermediate (Year 7) or just before, I chanced upon the Thomas Covenant trilogies by Stephen Donaldson. He immediately became my favorite author. I could somehow identify with a self-hating leper - and later in life, the fundamental paradox of these works, of a protagonist summoned to save a world he doesn't even believe in, became unexpectedly resonant. To simultaneously believe in something and not believe in it, to 'suspend my disbelief' in Coleridge's phrase, informed my 'illness' in that ,when talking with Jon Stewart and Barack Obama in my head, it enabled me to pretend that they were real. A few years ago, Donaldson being in the process of writing a third Covenant trilogy, I imagined him one night, suffering from writer's block, rummaging around in my mind for ideas. I was still, of course, to return to my Intermediate years, reading books 'inappropriate for my age'. I remember one time when staying with my family at a club ski field in Arthur's Pass the other guests discovering that the Hugh Cook Fantasy novel I was reading contained explicit sex scenes. It was terribly embarrassing, shaming, for other people to learn this, for others to deem me perhaps a Little Pervert. I feel less embarrassed about this today. So what if I was precocious? I see no reason now why children shouldn't read books intended for adults.

In Secondary School I broadened my tastes, reading not only fantasy and science fiction but also serious literature. I read Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Franz Kafka. I didn't particularly enjoy high school – not because I was bullied but because I never did my homework and consequently was continually in trouble with the teachers. In sixth form I had a genuinely good biology teacher, one who wasn't in my face all the time, one who permitted me to just sit and read Crime and Punishment without pestering me, all I really wanted to do, and, at the year's end, I rewarded him for his negligence by topping the school in the biology exam.

When I was a teenager, the authors I liked were solid intellectual male authors, canonical authors who produced tomes resembling door-stops. I gauged a writer's masculinity by his brains. Although I didn't discover David Foster Wallace until my mid-twenties, he ticked all the boxes; I had for some time been unable to find any writers I could really dig, appreciate, and had worried that maybe I didn't like reading anymore. Oblivion rekindled my faith in literature. It is only recently that I have really started to include woman writers among my favorites, writers such as Virginia Woolf (who I recently wrote a post about) and the wonderful Penelope Fitzgerald whose novel The Blue Flower I cannot recommend too highly.

With respect to poetry… I have never been a really huge poetry aficionado although I imagine I have read more than most people. Yes, I read some verse when I was a child (Carol for instance) but I got into poetry properly in an odd way, by reading an essay by C.M. Bowra in The Creative Experiment about The Waste Land. In this essay Bowra sought to illuminate The Waste Land by interpreting it in light of the myth of the Fisher King – it made Eliot's poem seem like a Fantasy novel to me, and drew me to it. So it was only after I had read a critical commentary on it that I came to the poem. Bowra's essay has colored my understanding of this Modernist masterpiece ever since. If one wants to start reading poetry, by the way, perhapsThe Waste Land is not a bad place to begin.

After I left school I completed first a BA and then an MA in English Literature. I read all the usual suspects: Pynchon, Camus, DeLillo, Joyce, Henry James, all of Melville, Synge, Beckett, Dickens, Frame and so on and so on… I am not going to talk much about the books I have read as an adult because I think it is more interesting to have talked about how got into reading in the first place.

I might say one more thing. For much of my life I have not just measured my self-worth in terms of the number of books I had read but also in respect to the number of words I know. Some people seek to expand their vocabularies by looking up lists of obscure words on the Internet but I can say proudly that all the words I know I have learnt from the books I've read. If I'm reading and I hit on a word I don't know I immediately look it up – a good habit to get into I believe. I learnt the word 'quotidian' from Wallace I think, the word 'kyphotic' from Will Self's Umbrella, more recently the words 'orgulous' and 'cresset' from Woolf and the word 'terpsichorean' from Henry Miller's Nexus. I remember a couple of years ago mentioning the word 'caryatid' to a friend, a noun I'd learnt from a documentary about Parisian architecture, and being very disappointed to find that she already knew it.

In the last couple of months, I've noticed, this blog has started receiving far more traffic than it formerly did. I thought I would conclude this post by recommending some short stories I've published in it – 69, Starlight and A Refusal to Mourn. These posts are a little older and so readers might not think to look for them but I would like people to glance through them anyway, if they feel so inclined; I would like to consider myself an author first and a cultural critic second. At some point I am going to stop writing this blog and put together a proper novel… but not quite yet.