03.03.07 on reading
My mother taught me to read when I was three years old, giving me a head start on my studies. I became a complete bookworm, practically incapable of eating without reading at the same time, and in college, I was a huge fan of Canadiana and worked my way through Atwood and the complete works of Robertson Davies, despite a huge amount of required reading for school. And that’s all before I picked up Tolkien and Austen.
After college ended, I could hardly get myself to finish a book, to enjoy the activity, not for want of trying. I had years when I read one, sometimes no books at all. Had I read everything that was ever susceptible of pleasing me? Were videogames rotting my brain? Whatever the reason, I realized this and owned it. I thought of myself as someone who didn’t read; despite having the most avid readers as my good friends, I accepted being left out of all literary conversations. I just don’t read, I thought.
Then early last year over the holiday, I happened to pick up Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, and nearly everything changed. Something about reading events that had really happened was so much more compelling than a novel. I gobbled it up and ravenously looked for more. I picked up and inhaled the biography of Elizabeth I, then friends lent me Bill Bryson’s Australia travelogue In a Sunburned Country. Hooked on non-fiction, I followed up exhilaratingly with Blink, Guns, Germs and Steel, A Short History of Progress, Freakonomics, Maus and Heroes of History. I was unstoppable!
It’s not the fact that I’m learning about the world that does it for me; it’s not the promise of more success at trivia, nor even the added compellingness of true stories. It’s the way non-fiction is written, to deliver information as directly and clearly as possible, that really turns me on. Call me impatient, call me producerly efficient, but when I pick up a novel now I feel the author knows where he’s going and is delaying getting to the point, the better to weave the tale. Non-fiction in comparison delivers the goods straight. I feel less… manipulated.
I’ll hopefully go back to fiction eventually, but for now, I’m going to ride this positive addiction as far as it takes me (which right now happens to be France, where Mary Queen of Scots is growing up).
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I went in opposite, but parallel, directions — read tons of fiction as a kid, stopped after university as well, and then after 9/11 I kinda overdosed on political books and stuff relating to urbanism and energy. Now I’m getting back into fiction in a big way — in fact my project is to swap nearly every book I have for little orange Penguin paperbacks. So if you want some more nonfiction I got tons….
I feel this is apples and oranges. Fiction/non-fiction are not mutally exclusive. They serve completely different purposes in the same way that a drama or a documentary do (although they often overlap).
What would the world be without Shakespeare and his “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”? He tells us nothing factual and meanders grandiloquently with his sentences (and words like “grandiloquently”) and yet somehow reveals to us the human condition in a way that has practically revised the human condition altogether.
One type of reading I find that blends the aspects of both fiction and non, are biographies. But it depends on the author.
Some very good books here!
Maybe you’d like “The Wives of Henry the Eighth” by Antonia Fraser, or “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century” by Barbara Tuchman. Both are real page turners in the non-fiction realme
Hey you Martin imposter! Get out of that Jello tree!
Say, my little Anne of Green Gables, did you also try Connections from James Burke?
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