As a teen with literary pretensions, I read. A lot.
Orwell, Huxley, Faulkner, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Updike, Austen — I remember reading them in a trance-like remove, lost for hours within their interior monologues, and caught up, too, in the physicality of reading — the books’ musty smells, the whisper of their pages as I turned them.
Even the words on the page had a tangible presence for me — which is a sense hard to explain to a non-reader — with the words taking on their own geometries, weight, taste in the mouth.
None of these writers were included in my high school English curriculum. (No, wait: I remember wading through Hemingway’s Old Man and The Sea, taught in class because its 128 pages of terse, stilted prose suited teenage attention spans.)
And none of the above — my literary precocity — is meant as a boast. Quite the opposite. Most of what I read went way over my head. How could I sail through Moby Dick — which I have yet to finish — when I could barely navigate puberty? I didn’t possess the life experience to grasp the deeper meanings that lay beneath the books’ pages, and my recall of much of what I read evaporated days after reading it.
What did last, though, were the books’ rhythms, their sing-song sentences. Reading is work, but writing is compulsion, and the urge to write came to me osmosis-like as I ingested books, or, rather, as they ingested me. Reading changed my way of thinking, and then changed the trajectory of my life.
At The Vancouver Sun, the older reporters in the newsroom introduced me to a whole new list of authors, most of whom wrote non-fiction. John McPhee, Christopher Hitchens, Mary McCarthy, Ian Frazier, Susan Orlean, Paul Theroux, Joseph Mitchell, Edward Hoagland — I devoured them, and bought first editions of their books as if to establish kinship with them.
Then one day, everything changed.
That day, which according to my colleague and fellow columnist Vaughn Palmer, was April 11, 1977, when reporter Doug Sagi crafted the last news story written on a typewriter for The Sun. As if to foretell what was coming, the story was about the death of Sun columnist Jack Wasserman who died at the age of 50 while delivering a speech at the Hotel Vancouver. Palmer recalled that Sagi, after filing his story with the city desk, remarked that they were seeing the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.
The next day, all the typewriters in the newsroom were removed and replaced with keyboards and video screens. To acclimatize ourselves to this new reality, reporters and editors were encouraged to play games on the computers so that we might become comfortable with them. Given what was coming, it was like asking us to familiarize ourselves with handguns and consider suicide.
One game we played was Mahjong. A pile of overlapping tiles had to be removed by matching them up in pairs. I loved it. I loved its three-dimensional graphics. I loved the immediate gratification. I loved, most of all, the ease of it, that it put my mind in neutral. I discovered a previously untapped talent for distraction, and I spent hours playing it.
And then, the deluge. Emails. Search engines. Digital libraries, iPhones, tablets, podcasts, YouTube, influencers, audiobooks, Kindle, ChatGPT, AI — we were inundated by the wave of digital platforms within which newspaper after newspaper would drown.
Imperceptibly at first, I began to lose my taste for reading. I read newspapers, of course, because I had to. But novels? Biographies? Non-fiction? Histories?
They fell away. The books in my library languished on their shelves. Distraction became a part of my life — surrendering to Netflix bingeing, spending days playing Zelda on the Nintendo Switch my wife bought me to keep me from going insane during the COVID months, monitoring emails and my iPhone obsessively.
Most pathetic of all, I would sequester myself in the bathroom, sit on the toilet and play solitaire on an iPad. It was a colossal, utterly stupid waste of time, but it became an addiction, and I would promise myself that I would play just one more game, until, an hour later, I would have sat on the toilet until I lost all feeling in my legs.
I was in no way alone in this. Several surveys found that children read much less than they used to, and showed a decline in literacy skills in almost all provinces — this in a country ranked as one of the most highly educated in the world.
In 2023, 46 per cent of Americans reported not finishing a single book. The decline in reading affected men in particular, who not only read less than women in general, but now read much less fiction than women — a phenomenon that, in part, I ascribe to the fact that the overwhelming majority of authors crowding local bookstores’ shelves are now women.
I pondered all of this last week, standing in front of my bookshelves feeling guilty, when I spotted a book I had never noticed before. It was a paperback copy of The Grass Harp by Truman Capote. I had read Capote in my youth, and I remembered the crystalline beauty of his prose, and his choice of the perfect phrase that would make me yearn with envy.
There was an inscription on the book scrawled in black pen. It was from a close friend, a gift for my 73rd birthday. He had signed the inscription “Your brother.”
I felt miserable. I had not only forgotten he had gifted the book to me, I had shelved it without ever reading it.
It struck me then, in front of those accusatory shelves of books, of all the time I had wasted in front of a computer screen’s mesmerizing glow, of the puerile mindlessness I had let crowd out the beauty of books, and the concentration and self-reflection they demand.
So I opened the book.
I turned to page 1.
I began to read.
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