reading books

I’ve always read a lot of books.

It’s been my favourite thing to do my whole life. My dad has videos of me sat in the garden reading out loud from an early age. He claims I had just remembered the words rather than actually reading them but I know I was a prodigy, back then at least.

Later, I’d come home after school, play outside, do my homework, then spend the hours between dinner and bed ignoring terrestrial television and reading books. We were given some ludicrously low number of pages to read for school each day, kids books from the communal bookshelf, but even then I considered myself above such childish endeavours.

I’d hammer that book out and get to what I really wanted to read. Fantasy mostly. Dragons and elves and stuff. Lord of the Rings of course but a great story called Lords of the Sky by Angus Wells was a favourite of mine. I later read this book as a young adult and found it to be somewhat lacking when it came to dialogue, the female characters being oddly ravenous when it came to their male counterparts. To be 8 again and know that this is not always the case.

Anyway, I graduated out of fantasy and began to read serious fiction, even if I did dip into the myths every now and again for some relief. Even though I found comfort in these familiar tales, they grappled with eternity, destiny and greatness. The Achilles choice between a short and glorious life or a long and forgettable one is one for everyone to ponder:

Two fates bear me on to the day of death.
If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy
My journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
My pride, my glory dies...
True, but the life that's left me will be long,
The stroke of death will not come on me quickly

What would you do in the face of such a decision? Is it better to burn out than to fade away? We all know what Achilles chooses - it’s why we talk about him now.

I was never above crappy books - I appreciate the skill of a Dan Brown, skimming the transparently propulsive prose even as I snobbishly judged the words of an incredibly successful writer - but I really got most of my big feelings as a young man from great books.

Including Harry Potter. If you dislike it then I suspect you deeply.

I’d happily take on tough books, interspersing classics with more modern experimental pieces. Later and particularly since leaving rugby, I’ve read a lot more non-fiction and personal development books. Michael Lewis is the man I admire now, making high frequency trading or baseball statistics as compulsive as any dragon I ever got to ride through the eyes of a protagonist.

I’ve read some big ideas and learned a lot from a Nassim Taleb or a Daniel Kahneman. I aspire to becoming Antifragile or a Sovereign Individual - one of my friends told me that I’m not morally judgemental and I think that I am, but I like to see what’s over there on the other side. I’m happy to concede that there are things to learn from people I don’t like, to challenge my perspective.

And eventually, although I’ve learned from many of these latter-day forays into the factual, it’s only convinced me that great fiction is really where there are lessons to be learned. Non-fiction is easy in some respects. It requires research and occasionally, courage. Fiction, to spin something up from nothing, is the true art. The act of creation is why even the airport lit writer is deserving of some respect, no matter how formulaic.

So what I’ve mostly settled on is a policy of concurrently reading fiction and non-fiction together. Sometimes I learn from one, sometimes the other. Sometimes one makes me laugh, the other moves me deeply. Sometimes they’re merely ok.

What I’m aiming to do though, is to document these books in a bit more detail, to remember more of what I read. My non-fiction reading is done largely on my Kindle so I can take notes while although I read fiction on there too, I still love the tactility of a book in hand, taking off the dust jacket so I can preserve its integrity. I’m a bit of a binge reader, cruising through several books in a couple of weeks before merely reading things on the internet for a couple. By writing down my reflections, I want to keep my reading more consistent, especially as it helps lull me to sleep far better than watching Peep Show reruns on my phone.

Moving forward I’ll write a short review on each one I read, maybe including a couple of quotes and links to some similar work. We’ll see how they go.