Few things have captured my attention and stuck with me as the written word has. Ask anyone who knows me, I’m a man of many interests. Just when you think you know what I’m going to be obsessed with next, I go and find something completely different. As one friend put it, I zig when you think I’ll zag. There are so many interesting things in life, and yet, ever since I was young, reading and literature has always been a prevalent occupation of my mind.
Flash back to the 90s with me, when I was a kid in school, and my teacher read us Two Bad Ants by Chris Van Allsburg (of Jumanji fame). For some reason, that was the lightning rod that made me a reader. The way the stories and pictures worked together fed my imagination like nothing I’d ever experienced. In fact, this is one of my earliest memories (my very first memory being: asking my mom if I could eat a second hot dog). I was struck by that book, and now that I look back on it as a grown man, I’m sure I was taken aback that another human could produce such a thing. Another early memory of mine, and perhaps my first memory as a consumer, was buying a handful of Scooby Doo books with some money I was given, instead of buying toys. This was a hard decision, of course, but I was into books. And now I buy toys (er, collectibles) and books. The only thing that’s changed is the adult money that allows me access to both worlds. Though, I buy way more books than toys these days.
I’m not sure exactly what it was, maybe it was the active participation of reading, that enticed me so. When you watch a movie, you’re not really part of the story. But when you’re reading, you’re in it. I think this is why people enjoy video games so much, the immersion. Movies and TV shows move at their own pace, but books are all about the reader. Or, maybe, more simply, I was born to be a writer, and writers are born readers. It’s hard to say.
I read all kinds of great books in early grade school from Frog and Toad to Tacky the Penguin, both I’m sure, were factors that contributed to me being an odd sort of duck. Especially that penguin. But, more importantly, my love of reading was fostered by my father, who was, and still is, an avid reader. That man has never met a thousand-page book that he didn’t like. Those fantasy tomes are thick, but he gets through them like they are nothing. So, what was a few picture books and then eventually chapter books to him? Spending time reading with someone close to you nurtures your love for reading in a way that’s hard to describe. You associate it with good memories, I suppose. And then, like teaching a person to fish, you become a reader for life.
When I got a little bit older, I think I was in fourth grade, I discovered the work of Roald Dahl (accompanied by the unmistakable artwork by Quentin Blake). This discovery boosted my love for reading even more. It showed me the pure power of imagination. Maybe it was the artwork, but I still associate Dahl’s stories with loud, whacky, creative color schemes. It’s a sort of synesthesia that translates words to colors. His work, my favorite being The BFG, showed me a silly, vibrant new world and demonstrated that adults could have fun. It wasn’t all stuffy nonfiction (more on that later, as I’ve come around on that subject), and school textbooks. There was a whole wide world out there, and reading had given me a ship with which to explore it.
The years wore on and I grew into more of a reader than ever. I had some neighbors who were Jehovah’s Witnesses but had somehow come into possession of the first three Harry Potter books. They weren’t allowed to read them, so they gave them to me. I was hooked from the beginning. It was also around this time that I was big into Brian Jacques’ Redwall series. What a time to be a reader. I was neck deep in chapter books when, in what they would now call my “tween years” I discovered something miraculous. A modern marvel. Literally! Comic books. Comics and graphic novels hit my world like an asteroid, upending everything. Suddenly, I was a comic book nerd, and it’s stuck to this day. Much like Van Allsburg’s work on Two Bad Ants, I suspect it was the combination of words and pictures that did it for me with comics. The power of words, which I had fallen so deeply in love with (by this time, I knew I wanted to be a writer of some kind), and pictures, which I had been drawing my whole life, basically. To see them put together in this way, it was an unstoppable, unbeatable combination. Comics would go on to take over my reading life for a long time. There were years there where, outside of schoolwork, I exclusively read comics. Novels are great, but I noticed there was something satisfying about a quick read, too.
Contrary to the belief that was held when I was growing up, and this is changing more and more, comics can tackle complex complicated stories, with dense narrative and beautiful art. They can hang with the best of them. Read Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and tell me that’s the same as Garfield (nothing wrong with Garfield, though). I initially collected comics all throughout high school and college, but eventually quit the game because 1) it was getting expensive, 2) it took up a lot of physical space, and 3) it was a whole lot of upkeep and after several years, enough was enough. So, I switched to reading collected editions and stopped worrying about bagging and boarding them and saving them for a future where they might, but never really are going to be, worth something.
Time marches on and I began undergrad as an English major. I studied all sorts of writing and literature, stuff I never would have read on my own. I took class on Hemingway and Faulkner, Native American Lit, African American Lit, Latin American Lit, and more. It helped me grow not only my love of reading, but also the scope of my reading. Without college, I never would have read the likes of Infinite Jest, 100 Years of Solitude, or the Sound and the Fury. All books that I really enjoyed and that I still think about over a decade later. These books, and many more, showed me how important literature really was to me. I wanted to read. No, I needed to read. And I wanted to discuss these books. Of course, looking back, I was a bit of a bonehead, and was worried a little more about socializing on campus than I was with focusing on schoolwork. You live and learn, I guess.
Most importantly, from literature, I began to see the world from different viewpoints. Books can take you anywhere on Earth (or beyond), any time. They can show you life from vantage points beyond your own. This opened my eyes to the world. We all exist in our own little slice of life, and with reading, we can move beyond it. Ultimately, it puts before you a path that can only be illuminated by the written word. I guess what I’m trying to say is: reading rules.
I know that’s a feel-good way to look at things, and a good stopping point, but that’s only half of my journey. It’s right about here that I took the wrong lesson from literature. I can see all the above now, with hindsight. But back then, it went a little more to my head. I began to think that I, and I alone, knew what it really meant to be a reader. I knew what you should read, and how you should read it. In short: I became a gate keeper.
Right after college, I began working at a comic book store. In my head, I was the authority on comics. If you weren’t reading what I was reading, or what I deemed to be “real comics,” you might as well not be reading comics at all. Anything short of Watchmen and Y the Last Man, and whatever you were looking at was just bubblegum comics. It was, as I reflect on it now, not a good look. Time makes fools of us all, I guess. Which is a saying I just now realized works both ways, because you can look backwards and realize, as I have often done, that you were indeed a fool.
But try not to hold the gate keeping against me. I was 22, 23, maybe.
I think I held this view until something miraculous, something utterly life changing, happened: I was hired at the Marysville Public Library. It took a couple of years on the job, but I eventually unlearned the harmful gate keeping mindset that I had adopted in my folly. I abandoned my King of the Nerds disposition and began to see literature as something more than I had in college. The depth, the breadth of literature. It couldn’t be measured. I was no king, but a lowly peasant. All that I thought I knew was just the tip of the iceberg. I slowly came to see that you can’t shame people for liking what they enjoy. I see now how wrong I was to try and patrol that for other people. This was a revelation, it broadened my horizons, showed me the whole picture. What I mean to say is, reading is reading, no matter what you read. And if reading is as life changing and as personal as I’ve come to see it now, how could I hold against someone what they were reading. The two views just couldn’t coexist, and I chose the one where reading anything was good. This is something I still hold true to this day, and don’t see that changing any time soon.
This exposure to the library inevitably expanded my reading habits in ways that would not only affect me as a reader, but also as a writer and artist. Without the library, I never would have discovered Carl Barks (Donald Duck Comics) or my love of Cervantes and Don Quixote, a book that I now aim to adapt into comics. To be honest, the library is the greatest resource for any true reader. You don’t need to own every book you read or possess them physically when they have imprinted on you, the knowledge stays with you. The number of books you can find through the modern library system blows me away, even after a decade of working there. All this access to books is something that, and I’m not exaggerating here, has changed my life.
Working at the library has also introduced me to the varied types of reading resources we are lucky to have access to these days. That meaning physical, audio, and e- books. I think that before my time at the library, I didn’t consider these forms of reading as “real reading,” but now, and especially with the evolution of technology, I can’t see reading without these methods. The first time I took on the mad knight Don Quixote, I used my phone to listen to the audio book, which helped me surmount the anxiety I had grown to tackling such a big, important, classic work. And reading comics on an iPad? That’s about as good as it gets, it’s practically my preferred method for reading them these days. I can’t tell you how convenient it is to carry all those books on your phone or tablet. The library has a ton of digital resources, my favorites being the likes of Libby and Hoopla, of which, if you’re a reader, you should be sure to take advantage of.
Reading continues to be an important, daily, part of my life (maybe the part I take the most joy in, too). Now, I’m back in school for my MA, looking to teach English. I look forward to the further evolution of not only my reading of, but my appreciation for literature. These days, I find my interest in literature all over the place. As of this writing, I’m dabbling in a bit of everything. This includes reading about writing, philosophy, and rhetoric. Oh, yeah, that “stuffy nonfiction” that I mentioned earlier, I find the older I get, the more I enjoy that kind of writing. The appreciation of this type of literature, and any other sort that I might get into in the future, is a result of both working at the library and going back to school. One day, I aspire to teach English, both composition and literature. I think it might be interesting to revisit this essay in the future to see what teaching literature will afford me in the way of appreciation for reading. And, in addition, this is going to retool and sharpen my ability to close read and analyze text. Good times ahead.
Of course, in ten years, I could look back and see myself as a bonehead again. Just with more words. Here’s to personal growth. Here’s to literature.
The Scruffy Scribe 