Growing up in the 1960s I was not a “reader” as a kid. Being the middle kid of five it was important that I kept my head on a swivel and maintained “situational awareness” of whatever was going on in our busy household (even though I would not know that phrase for decades). But if I was given a choice I’d choose to spend my time watching whatever was on TV, and when there was nothing on, I’d take out paper and doodle and draw. Developing a relationship with words was kind’a an accident of history that would take many years to “happen.”

The family moved to Southern California in 1966 but because our house wasn’t ready to move into we stayed at an aunt and uncle’s house for a couple months. What that meant for me is that I celebrated Halloween in my Northern California 3rd grade classroom, but didn’t return to school until January in Southern California. The reason I bring this up is that after two months “off” I wonder what I missed. All I know is when I got back in the classroom it seems we’d switched from simple picture books to chapter books and I wasn’t entirely happy with the transition. Every visit to the school library found me running to the section with the National Geographic or Life magazines. I was definitely a big color pictures with two sentence caption kind’a “reader.” Things probably would have stayed that way, doodling and TV, had I not been living in Southern California at a time when a bunch of religious hippies started showing up everywhere. 

Actually some time early in my high school sophomore year I found one of my mom’s Michener novels laying around and decided to give it a go. It was a great story, something about an archeological dig in some hills near Jerusalem. I don’t remember how far I got into the novel, but starting one’s novel reading with a massive historical novel like The Source was a bit of a mistake. Then, unrelated to the curtailed novel reading effort, I had a “religious experience” in the Spring and some internal drive was created in me to learn all that I could about this Jesus guy that the hippies were all on about. It turns out that the most important source of information was a book more intimidating that Michener’s Source, The Bible. 

A couple things about teenagers, being so young they’re not easily intimidated by what they don’t know and have lots of energy to dedicate to whatever grabs their attention. And that’s the spirit that I brought to reading the Bible as a fifteen-year-old. I did get a major assist by a friend who lent me a copy of the bible that was less confusing than the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible (circa 1582), a modern English paraphrase of the New Testament called The Way. It also helped that I didn’t start with Genesis, trying to understand what was going on, but with the New Testament and the Gospel of Matthew. I still didn’t know what was going on, but it was pretty clear that the Pharisees were the bad guys and that Jesus was very much like the hippies that I had met and who made it clear that the Catholic Church was just as out of step with things as the Elders had been in Jesus’ time. 

Eventually I graduated from the simplistic language of The Way, and gave the King James Version a serious read. It probably helped that I was much more familiar with the stories by the time I made the switch, but I began to fall in love with the richness of the words and the poetic mixing of word order, making the world of these words feel important and special and beautiful on a level that Southern California vernacular utterly failed. 

So I came to love words because reading was the best way to satisfy my need to understand the world, and I fell in love with this rich blend of vocabulary and word-play that transported me, beyond what was originally a confusing “religious experience.” In the last two years of high school I read my bible from Genesis to Revelation at least half a dozen times switching to various modern translations to help me understand… everything. Of course, as a teenager, “everything” isn’t a very large domain. And that domain was going to experience a serious challenge as I entered university. 

Truthfully, even though I’m a couple generations older than those effected by “screens,” my capacity to just sit and read has never been that great. But I’ve managed enough to earn two Bachelor’s degrees, a Masters and a couple years into a doctorate. But for the last few decades any long form reading generally required an audio version of the book, such that my mind and imagination were not limited to the speed with which my eyes can do their work. 

It’s kind’a funny, I crave information and, except when I’m writing, I rarely don’t have a news or tech audio podcast playing, or YouTube video playing on something I find interesting. And any travel of any distance is usually accompanied with a good (audio) book. On one drive from Southern California to the Bay Area to attend MacWorld I listened to On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. On lunch breaks or my daily commute (back when I had somewhere to drive to) I’d listen to whatever was Bart Ehrman’s most recent book. I crave information, but my least favorite method of experiencing said information is sitting with a physical book and rolling through the pages. As a writer, it’s kind’a embarrassing. And it’s not one of these I want AI to summarize the book for me. It’s certainly not about not having the time. I don’t want the AI generated one paragraph summary. I want to experience the words chosen by Ehrman or Herbert or Tolkien or Niven/Pournelle or Cixin Liu or Andy Weir. So I’m not quite like the “bullet point/summaries” generation, but I love that I can experience my books by being read to, by professionals, not stumbling over character names or difficult words (SIDE NOTE: For some journal articles I’ve been “reading” I’ve let the AI test-to-speech readers give it a go, and the results are sometimes hilarious but often a little distracting… ugh). 

So, I’m definitely not in the “reading is a useless relic of the past” camp, but I don’t belong in the “how many novels are you reading simultaneously and did you get the author’s signature on any of the books in your collection” camp either. I guess I’m just one of those weirdos who love media and stories and I’m particularly caught up in the preciousness of how it’s delivered (though I am hugely interested when stories move from one mode of transmission to another, like the choices made by the makers when they take a book and make a movie based on the book… love that stuff). It’s really about humans trying to take all of the thoughts and feelings and dreams that are rattling around in our skulls and sharing them with others, attempting to make connections and see the reflection of those thoughts and feelings in the eyes of others. It’s just that right now, with the explosion of access to technology anyone can be a storyteller or journalists or magician with words or images… and sadly, the meme about Shakespeare and needing enough monkeys with keyboards has been proven to be horribly untrue. But I still think that it’s fascinating that we have the possibility of having everyone share their story, no longer limited to expensive printing presses or industries needed to move physical “product.” I wonder how all of this will change when we’re able to share stories directly from person to person without artifice or machinery… I think there’s a sci-fi novel in that thought. Thank you, those of you who have read this long treatise to the “bitter end.” Enjoy. 

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Tags: audio books, love of words, reading, reading from screens, video Friays

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