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E Daggar Art's avatar

The clever person who wrote that reading books is a waste of time clearly has missed the entire point of reading— at least, of reading things other than self-improvement books. Sounds like a person who doesn’t know how to live.

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Paul Fenn's avatar

Amen to that, Sir Henry.

Weighing in as an ADD disaster zone on legs, high school dropout and, honestly, a once prideful ignorant tit, I didn't start reading daily until age 28 when I set out on a five-year grand tour, funded with money made selling office furniture systems. As a farewell gift, a Russian girl from work gave me a travel diary, wrote "Do. See. Write." in the inside cover. With those three words she changed my entire timbre from an intent to seek only unending debauch to testing my limits through all types of rough travel, hardship and adventure -- land, sea, mountain, linguistics, cultural immersion, etc. -- and, of course, much debauch in the off hours.

I spent those five years reading everything I could grab, trade, steal, occasionally buy. Many classics (Melville, Dickens, Defoe, Sartre, Kafka...) some modern fic (the Amises, Ludlum, Elton, McEwan, McCarthy, most of the Indians), Asian history and historical fiction (Burgess, Raffles, Levathes, Seagrave, Godshalk, GM Fraser, Gide, O'Hanlon), as I devoured Earth's wonders, often hunkered in the shade on yachts being delivered up the South China Sea, down the Tasman Sea, through the Flores Sea, edging the Malacca Straits and both sides of the Pacific. I inadvertently developed my own language learning system, mastering enough spoken Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Lao and Spanish to make travel twice as sweet and meaningful as having not done so.

Washed up broke in Singapore in '93. After a year varnishing yacht teak under the sun, found work writing copy with ad agencies for literate Brit and Aussie misfits. Remained almost seven years, kept reading, kept writing -- long letters, non-ad prose for fun, took a screenwriting course, had a fake news email circular mocking Asia's dictators. Some 30 years later I've just been hired to edit a succulent first novel and a much needed book on getting infrastructure done, have maintained my own unending travel story here on the Stack, and am on my 9th screenplay in five years' jamming with an LA writers group over Zoom. Still writing ad copy, which I love as much as ever.

Useful thing #1 I've learned: Curiosity's a perpetual motion machine; it is all it needs to keep going, growing.

Point is, if I can rise from idiocy to semi-usefulness, any fool can -- at any phase of life. The world of letters is as accessible as you let it be. Main thing is to read, write, think, connect ideas and histories and personae and the human-natural world trajectories and enjoy the absorptive brain you've been issued, no matter how pitted, dented and unmoored it might be. Because it will surprise you. You're much smarter and far tougher than you think.

Take the pain of device withdrawal however you need to -- aided by friends, sites like this one, booze, drugs, reading aloud, whatever's viable. I've taken to mixing up a double voddy martini at 7pm, closing the study door, then shouting out Lanchester's "The Last Lion" for a couple of hours in my best over-the-top poncy British accent (I'm from Toronto). I am having the time of my life with this, and my accent is improving with each of William's gorgeous sentences (I decided on this approach upon remembering that my long-dead dad, a WWII RAF Spitfire pilot and Churchill contemp, had told me Lanchester recited both volumes aloud to his secretary from memory, on the fly, who jotted it all by hand, then later typed it out. How fucking badass is that?

Useful thing #2 I've learned: Literature need not only be gazing into some fat old dusty book, hoping with dread or fear that it sinks in. Engage it like a lunatic, a terrorist, and you'll get something out of it, if only a laugh, sensations of elation, a set of exhausted vocal chords, an overtaxed mind.

I was intimidated by the smart kids and English teachers and books I couldn't read while I failed through my 12 years of school. Only one of those brats, besides me, is a working writer today, and he's a pretentious nutcase who writes abstruse books three people on earth can understand. I'm neither famous nor celebrated, and pretense eludes me despite my boldest efforts, but reading and writing's paid my bills for 30+ years and made me slightly less of a twat than I used to be. That'll do just fine.

After Lanchester, it's all of Shakespeare aloud, then all of Gibbons -- they're flanking me on the shelves, daring me to try. That ought to about see me out, or kill me. What great way to die.

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