I didn't become much of a reader till the middle of sophomore year of high school. I don't think I read a novel until my American English class with Ms. Larson (a tough teacher who was going through a divorce). The books I can recall reading for that class were:
- Scarlet Letter
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- The Great Gatsby
- The Wrath of Grapes
- The Jungle
- Brave New World
- Lord of the Flies
- Catcher in the Rye
- Fahrenheit 451
- Animal Farm -> creative writing class
- The Walden ( don't remember any of that book)
- Bring the Pain by Chris Rock
While in grade school, I read only a handful of books:
- Goosebumps stories
- Ripely's Believe It or Not
- The Outsider
In college I read,
- The Fliver King
- Less than Zero
- The Things They Carried
- Slaughter House Five
- Breakfast of Champions
School counselor in high school opened my mind to reading as a skill, not inherit talent.
I want to write a piece about my growth as a reader. Books were not present in my upbringing. Going to the library was not frequent. Only a handful of times, but i was also excited to go.
I'd browse through bookstores and hang around magazines, especially videogame magazines. I read a lot videogame magazines.
first RPG was Final Fantasy 3 (US). Reading lots of text throughout the game prepared me for a skill I didn't realize I was building: long periods of uninterrupted attention and focus while engrossed in a world. Final Fantasy 7 released that year I played FF 3 and when I got a playstation and FF 7, I played over 100 hours.
Ezra Klein said something powerful about the effect books have on attention:
And I just had to change. And it wasn’t advice that changed me. It was life. It was experience. And it was things that I couldn’t have predicted and still don’t, myself, really understand.
So, I mean, I have some things that I think are just good for people all the time: I think people should read as many books — on paper — as they possibly can. I think that building that form of attention in yourself, even aside from what you learn from the books, building the ability to focus and think for long periods of time, is so valuable. And it is only getting more valuable as TikTok and the internet and A.I. and a million other things train us out of that. As everybody’s brain is being adapted to a much more hyper-stimulated, short-form world, the ability to think in long form becomes that much more valuable.
A thing I admire about Ezra is that he was an unremarkable student and became a remarkable thinker. He's intellectual breathe is so immense. I often ask myself how does he know so much. I think its because he reads books, a lot of them. Much like Bill Gates, he can embody narratives in books so complete that he can talk in prose. I think Scott Galloway is the same way, in that he's a writer and from his writing, he speaks with some neat turning of phrases.
Male Role Model
Mr. Laney was the person I wanted to become. He was smart, intellectually a giant, a renaissance man, and great orator. He read books like he drank water. He took notes, endlessly writing notes to what he read. I remember lots of yellow legal pads.
What is common among Galloway, Klein, Mr. Laney, and Gates is that these men are people I admire because they found an unlock to human knowledge: books.
I don't know if there is a blog post in this. But i keep thinking about several things. I admire these men. I want to be an intellectual like them. Mr. Laney served as a key role model for me. He is the reason I really caught the book bug. I thought if i am well read like him that i can be a thinker like him and also a writer.
fuel for writing is reading books. If i want to be a good writer, I need to read as many books on paper as much as I can.
My challenges while reading are slow reading, low tolerance for fiction writing's need for disbelief, and when tried, inability to decipher words into meaning.