Ever since I was a child, up until about the time I left for college, one of the great loves of my life was reading. I proved this love in a very obvious way: I read all the time. Whether it was in the car on the way to school, sitting in class after I’d finished my work, during lunch time, waiting after school, in between classes, on an airplane… Wherever it might be, I had my nose stuck in a book.
I didn’t really read for edification, but more for enjoyment. While I had a love of learning and of the sciences and all that, I stuck pretty much to fiction, except for a couple years in grade school and junior high where I read every book in the library on astronomy, every book on codes and ciphers, every book on programming languages, and every book on origami. While that sounds like a lot of books, it pales in comparison to the number of fiction (usually trade paperback) books I read.
I stayed fairly well within the bounds of the Fantasy/Sci-Fi genre, occasionally dabbling in YA fiction and the more popular non-fantasy fiction like Tom Clancy novels or Michael Crichton novels. On average, I would probably read a couple hundred pages a day of this stuff, so I very quickly became acquainted with all of the authors I was recommended or found on my own in the library.
I’m not sure why I was attracted to this genre. Maybe it was that when I first learned to read, some of the first books I tackled were the Chronicles of Narnia novels, and the magic of those experiences drew me into worlds that were created to be very different from ours. Maybe I empathized with the main characters of fantasy stories, who usually had some sort of mysterious hidden powers which set them on a great adventure, because I fancied the same thing was true of myself, albeit in a very earthly and more boring way. But anyway, I’ve never figured out if I really liked fantasy because of who I was, or if I became who I was/am because I read fantasy. Probably both are true to some degree, but whichever wins out, we were a good match.
Indeed, my first read of The Lord of the Rings, in 5th grade I think it was, was a life-changing experience for me. I recognized in those novels a creative act so profound and imaginative and detailed that I immediately knew that I wanted to emulate it, whatever it was. The vastness and beauty of the world and stories Tolkien created had a very deep impact on me, and all the more so because of the linguistic ingenuity and toil that went into developing the languages that he did.
While I had dabbled in codes and cipher languages beforehand, it had never occurred to me to create an artificial natural language, with its own complete evolutionary history, grammar, morphology, lexicon, and all the rest. Of course, I began on one of these immediately. I’ve since lost all my work for that, and the one or two that came after it, but the point is I’ve been working on languages as a creative, not an educational, exercise ever since then. While this is a pretty big example of how I am dramatically different (in an odd way) than your average American because of the books that I read as a youngster, it’s certainly not the only example.
The main thing my love of reading got me, almost by accident, was a facility with words and putting them together in correct or interesting ways (depending on how I needed to use them). Without ever taking a writing class or wanting to (English was my least favorite subject, though I always made the highest grades in it), I became a good writer. For a young student, anyway. That ability may have left me completely by now, or may have dulled in comparison with the bright stars that are my excellent peers.
So it is surprising that, after beginning at Stanford (even, to some extent, after moving to Florida the year before), I pretty much stopped reading for entertainment entirely. Part of it was my newfound hobby of exploring Christian philosophy and apologetics, which lent more to reading non-fiction texts, but I think a good deal of it was that I started to hang around people more, instead of retreating to a room by myself with a book. While I have fond memories of that particularly comfortable action, I guess I decided that I was just too big of a nerd, and I needed to learn how to make friends and have winning social skills, or something like that.
Then, with the move to study philosophy at Stanford, I spent so much time every day reading philosophy that I had no desire left to open a book, even if it was one that I’d been wanting to read. Also around that time I began to take physical activity much more seriously. I got into running and rock climbing and began to devote much of my free time to those pursuits. They opened up a new and entirely enjoyable world to me of physical discipline, which I’d never been particularly turned off to, but rather had never got into because I was (and everyone told me I was) the “nerd type”. Team sports were therefore out of the question in high school, because people would expect me to suck at them and not give me a chance to improve, so I ended up actually sucking at them. Maybe that’s why I got into climbing and running first–individual sports where I was my only judge. There is much comparison with others in those sports, of course, but you rarely let others down by sucking. Anyway, I ramble.
The point is, my life began to take a much more well-rounded shape. I am very happy for this, and today, four or five years later, I feel that my mind is sharp, but also my body is in the best shape it’s ever been, and allows me to engage by myself and with other athletes at a decent level, at just about any activity (disregarding my current sprained ankle).
We were moving houses in Orlando the other week, though, and so I was unpacking my library of books into bookshelves. Each one that came out was like a little bit of nostalgia, reminding me of the time that we were friends. Some of the books even seemed to sulk accusingly, wondering where I’ve been. It triggered a bit of a lament, that something which was so important to me, and which I still long to spend time with, has been sort of shoved to the back of my personality. I don’t think this is really lamented in my community, as no one else really seems to have been the bookworm (though many of us are nerds, of course), so there’s also a sensation of loneliness when I regard this current lack of mine.
I didn’t stop reading absolutely completely, of course, and I was very glad to be spending most of my reading time studying philosophy, which I love. It did mean that I would read something like 4-5 novels a year, instead of 40-50 (during my most bookwormy days).
One of the other things I miss about reading a lot of good fantasy stories is the way that they hook into my memories along with music. This fact about music and story was one of the first things I realized about myself when I first began to self-reflect heavily. I can listen to a CD that I used to listen to when reading a particular book, and somehow it will bring back a flood of associations with that story, but also with the time in which I was reading, and whatever else was going on in life then. Actually, I’m not sure if I really like the fact that many of my memories are tied up in stories rather than reality, but on the other hand I don’t want to dismiss the importance of story in our lives that way.
At any rate, much of that is to say that I am looking forward to not being able to run or play sports for the next month in some ways, primarily because it means I might be able to catch up on my reading. You see, various family members and others who knew of my love for books never actually stopped giving them to me as gifts, even though I’d stopped having the time to keep up with them. So I’ve got a whole bookshelf of stuff that I’m sure is really good, but I never got around to it. Hopefully that will happen now.
As a matter of fact, I’ve spent some good time pretty much every day in the last couple weeks doing some reading. I never used to work through more than one book at a time until I got to college (mostly because I read them so quick there was no need to), but I’ve been working on a few. I just finished El Alquimista, which is the Spanish translation of The Alchemist, originally written in Portuguese by Paulo Coelho. It’s not so much a fantasy story as a fairly short fable with a great story and message. I read it primarily because it was in a genre that I enjoyed, and because I felt that I should work on my Spanish. It actually marks the first novel that I’ve read cover to cover in Spanish, so I am proud to have done that (even though it was rather short). For some reason the translation of it is much, much easier to read than the translation of Harry Potter that I’ve half-heartedly picked up now and then. Anyway, I’ve also read the English version of this book, and it comes highly recommended.
I also just finished a book that Dan got me a couple years ago for Christmas, called Tales Before Tolkien, edited by Douglas Adams. It’s a collection of short stories by authors that Tolkien liked, or that influenced him, or that were his contemporaries, and things like that. Of the 20 or so stories, there were only a few that I didn’t really enjoy, and it was cool to see what “fairy tales” were like before Tolkien really catalyzed the “fantasy” genre.
As you know if you’ve been reading this blog for long, I’ve also been very slowly working through A Kierkegaard Anthology, edited I believe by Bretall. It is fairly heavy reading, but every time I commit time to it, I feel that I am immensely rewarded. In fact, of all the philosophers/theologians that I have read, I feel a very curious kinship with Kierkegaard. Maybe it is his insistence that he is a poet which I resonate most with, or maybe it is his whole-hearted devotion interacting with his genius that I long to emulate (with whatever fraction of genius it is that I have).
In any case, he is almost singlehandedly restoring my faith in the Bible as a text which remains deep and mysterious and fruitful for me to continue to study. I just read a portion of Works of Love, for instance, where he expands on the exhortation, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”. In 20 pages, he said so many interesting and deeply true (I believe) things about love that every now and then I had to shut the book and my eyes and just process. I don’t want to blindly follow whatever he’s saying, but when I read something of his and feel that I really understand it, I can’t help but thinking that it is both insightful, true, and what’s more encouraging. On the whole, I think the repudiation of him in the current Christian culture (as the father of Existentialism or whatever) is pretty much unjustified and a result of a shallow understanding of his thought (though I’m not yet a scholar, of course).
So, I’m feeling hopeful as regards reading, and I’m already wondering what it is that I’ll pick up next. Perhaps the new Harry Potter–Nyffy and I are going to have a series of reading parties with that one, I think. Stories like that are especially fun to read aloud (though maybe not as fun as The Chronicles of Narnia, because Rowling’s writing is so modern; it just doesn’t sound like one is reading an old fairy tale), so Nyffy and I enjoy trading chapters to read while the other smokes a pipe–another thing that Lewis and Tolkien bequeathed to us.
Well, there it is–an ode to the place of reading in my love and a pledge not to forget it entirely in the name of “balance”.
