Read, or dead?

The best part of ten years ago - about 1997, probably - my boss asked me how much I read. I said not much, a couple of magazines a month, that sort of thing. She said, to be better at your job you should read more. Read books, lots of books, by various authors. Read fiction, non-fiction, history, biography. Just read. And take notice of the punctuation and grammar. Distinguish what is "correct" and what is the author's style, or "voice". (My job, for those who don't know [and you may not even care] is book editor and magazine sub editor. This means I correct authors' text before it gets published. Tidy it up. Make it grammatically correct. That sort of thing.)

Since then, I've started reading again.

I used to read a lot as a kid. Like, A LOT. When I was about six or seven, older kids would ask me how to spell stuff, just to test me. Take my dinosaur book and ask me to spell the name of one of them. Mostly I got it right. I enjoyed reading and learning. I enjoyed fiction and history.

The great British schooling system beat that out of me! We didn't want to read Shakespeare. We didn't want to read Trollope. An Inspector Calls was good, though.

And after school I went straight to work as a shoe repairer on a YTS. No further education for me.

Somewhere down the line I started reading again. I don't really remember when. But, you know, reading for fun. The first book I remember reading for fun as an adult was Shogun. It was 1993. I loved it. Lapped it up. I read a couple more of Clavell's books, but they paled in comparison.

The trouble is, though, between Shogun and the conversation mentioned at the top of this post, I began working as an editor. And pretty soon I was spending my entire working day reading. That's the lion's share of my job. And nothing puts you off reading more than reading all day. At least that's what I thought for a few years. But now I read quite a lot again, and I'm glad about that.

I have a nephew who's 11 and a niece who's 12. They couldn't be more different in terms of reading.

My nephew (in the UK) reads all the time. He's obsessed with dinosaurs and Doctor Who. He's also just started to get into films. He devoured a film guide. At Christmas he asked me who directed some film. I told him and he rattled off a bunch of other films the guy had made. "Is that the same man?" he asked. I was like, "Ummm, yeah."

My niece (in Italy) hates reading. She sees it as a chore. She does it for school because she has to, but she'd rather be out on her bike, riding at the local stables, doing outdoorsy stuff. Reading is like a punishment.

I suppose somewhere between the two lies the ideal. But that is something that comes with age.

At heart, deep down, I'm more like him than her. In part I'm sure that's because we share genes. (My niece is on Wife's side of the family.) Left to my own devices, I'd spend days in front of the telly or a computer, picking at film guides and books on tattoos. Reading the odd novel. I'm not outdoorsy, but I've come to appreciate the value of being outdoors, getting a bit of sun, walking in the woods, feeling the breeze on my face. It's all good stuff.

The trouble with reading is that not everything grabs you. A little exchange with Ranting Dullard the other day revealed that he and I both found Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted more "putdownable" than his other work. When I go on holiday I take one or two books and they are all I have to hand, so I tend to read them even if they're not that great. At home, though, with a mass of books at my disposal, I find it far easier just to stop and turn to another one.

So, these are the books I currently (theoretically) have on the go. I say theoretically because although I have started them all, I may not finish some of them.

In the order I started them:

Stranger Than Fiction, Chuck Palahniuk (Non-fiction shorts; just didn't grab me)
Love All the People, Bill Hicks (Transcripts of gigs; good for dipping into)
The Electric Michelangelo, Sarah Hall (Something to do with tattooing, but slow to get going)
A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away, Christopher Brookmyre (Interesting start; not sure why I stopped...)
Breaking Vegas, Ben Mezrich (Good author, but this is a bit too much like his other books)
Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk (A novel of short stories; good, but putdownable)
New York Sawed in Half, Joel Rose (Account of a great hoax; good, but badly edited)