I love to read. And not in one of those I-am-so-much-smarter-than-you ways either. I sincerely love to read and have my entire life.
When I was a little boy growing up in LaGrange, Georgia my parents didn’t let me have video games. While most kids in my generation grew up on Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario, and the like I missed out. I had one friend who had a Sega and I’d play at his house but that was it. Instead I spent my hot Georgia summers playing outside and pretending to be the characters in the books I read.
Is it to hackneyed to say me and the neighborhood kids would pretend to be Robinson Crusoe or Huck Finn? If so I don’t care because we did. We didn’t have three hundred television channels back then even as it was starting to come into style. Maybe it was just that one section of Troup County but we filled our days playing baseball, exploring in the woods, and pretending to be from someplace besides Georgia.
The first author I loved was Matt Christopher. He wrote these sports books for children like Little Lefty and Catcher with a Glass Arm that I fell in love with. They were stories about young kids playing baseball and football and doing all the things I imagined I would do when I got to middle school. I don’t think anybody today knows who he was but I can say that other than my baseball cards these Matt Christopher books I had are still some of my most prized possessions.
My mom, being the teacher she was and still is, also bought me these classics for children. I don’t even remember who made them but you’d recognize them if you saw them. They couldn’t have been larger than a 3x5 note card and contained watered down versions of all the classics like Tom Sawyer, Robin Hood, and Little Women. I remember years later reading The Count of Monte Cristo in high school and absolutely being shocked that their were lesbians in the novel not because I was homophobic but rather my children’s version of the novel casually left that part out. When I was in third grade the boy who lived behind me and I read the children’s version of Annie Karina and took the accelerated reader test at school on it. Suffice it to say that some parts were left out so we missed out on the seventy some odd points.
When we moved to Atlanta my reading slowed down. I finally had video games to play and my interest changed from battling dragons and hitting homeruns to these weird creatures roaming the earth I didn’t understand called “girls.” But late at night when it was silent in the big house my family moved into I would hide out in my closet and read until my dad came up and told me it was after midnight and I needed to sleep.
In high school my life again changed. I started running and now my world was obsessed with that. So naturally my favorite book became the John L. Parker novel Once a Runner. It’s easily the best novel ever about track and field and probably one of the top sports novels of all time. Everything about Quentin Cassidy spoke to me and I wanted so badly to be that person who let loose demons with their swift kick and just wailed on.
As I got older my favorite books changed. At varying points I was obsessed with The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Fight Club, On the Road, The Great Gatsby, and The Sun Also Rises. I was a teenage boy and I liked boy books (except TPoBaW, which is a total chick book but this nerdy kid gets laid in it and that appealed to me in ways only my fellow nerds can comprehend). There was this anti-war book that I kept going back to called Fallen Angels and even though I was a young Republican at the time I just couldn’t believe stuff like that went on in the world and I can say that Walter Dean Myers novel helped to slowly shape who I am today.
Then college happened. My first semester of college I was surrounded by all these artsy kids in theater and visual arts and I wanted so badly to fit in with my jock tendencies. Then, like a visit from Hermes, it all made sense. I would be the bookish kid who read a lot! And because I was in college I would be this pseudo-writer and wear thick rimmed glasses and try to use big words and read important books. But who to read? I went to the one name I knew as being an intelligent writer.
I started my love affair with William Faulkner’s novels.
The first Faulkner I read was The Unvanquished and after that I was hooked. Was it over my head? Absolutely. But somehow through my perseverance I started to make sense of the actual stories being told, these narratives that spilled all the dirty little secrets of humanity out on the page as if George Wallace’s deepest secrets in his heart were exposed, and how they all happened in this one county in Northern Mississippi. Pardon my French, but this was heavy shit.
And because of Faulkner I started looking at other writers from the past. Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Conner became my guiding lights. Somebody told me I needed to read Notes From Underground (I was in college after all) and suddenly I was addicted to Russian lit and I was a kid again laying awake in bed at night imagining myself in these remote places dealing with my own demons and helping different people put theirs to rest.
At some point I was told that reading and writing is an active conversation that keeps going and I needed to read modern writers so I read what I can now say is my favorite novel ever, the Pat Conroy masterpiece of Grit Lit Prince of Tides. Every December I read this book to commemorate the 24 hour time span that I started the tragedy of the Wingo family and set it down, completed. And thanks to Pat Conroy and his now thirty year old novel I realized that there were great writers who are still alive and I pressed forward, exploring as much as I could.
Today I read what everybody reads and some stuff they don’t. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen my be my second favorite novel ever and even though he’s from St. Louis I consider him pretty close to a southern writer. Heck, Missouri is joining the SEC next year. Michael Chabon keeps me going back for more and I think that Thomas Pynchon is a god walking amongst mortals. I read Cormac McCarthy and Daniel Woodrell because that Faulkner thing is still going on. After attending a writers conference I re-discovered Joshilyn Jackson and decided I was being a sexist the first time around with her so I would give it a second time and have enjoyed it. John Brandon, between his two novels and work with ESPN, is slowly becoming a favorite of mine as well. This summer I even dusted off my old Hemingway collection and went back through those.
The point of this extended ramble is two fold. First, I needed a new blog up since people kept asking me about it (if you think I’m above self promotion you are sadly mistaken) and secondly I wanted to write about something that I still love. Oh, and I’m moving back to Georgia soon and I have no idea how I’m going to fit all my books into my car.
No comments:
Post a Comment