On Reading

I've never really considered myself a particularly strong reader. As nipper, I learned to read very well, but then couldn't really be bothered. I seem to recall that I borrowed The Hobbit from my Middle School library about half a dozen times, but never actually read a page of it. My family would frequent a mobile library which parked up near our local church. On each visit, I would browse the section that contained the Doctor Who books, pick one or two out, and then never even open them. It's entirely possible I didn't even read the blurb on the back of the books.

Throughout my youth, the only books that ever really made an impact on my were the Fighting Fantasy Adventure Gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and various knockoffs, such as the Indiana Jones Choose Your Own Adventure books (one of which, incidentally, led to a brief but bitter feud between my mother and me) which were comprised of short, numbered paragraphs of text followed by a choice of which paragraph to read next. I didn't even play them properly... When I reached a point where the book instructed me to "Test you luck", for example, I'd invariably presume good fortune was with me, rather than roll the dice. When it asked if I'd picked up a particular piece of equipment, well, of course I had!

But I digress. Even when given books as gifts, I'd put them on a shelf and studiously ignore them. I wasn't really interested, not least because I was far more interested in TransFormers toys and, later, computer games. It was only really in my teens, when studying English Literature at both GCSE and A-level, that I got bitten by the reading bug. While other folks complained bitterly about how dull Jane Eyre was, I actually rather enjoyed it. Later on, I discovered the concept of 'reading for pleasure' with Douglas Adams' Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, and even started raiding my parents' cabinet of old Sci Fi greats, written by the likes of Asimov and Bradbury, and their Sherlock Holmes omnibus.

During my adult life, I have had many books and authors recommended to me, and all of them have broadened my taste, albeit largely within the Sci-Fi and Fantasy genres. Random additions to my bookshelves include things like Natsume Soseki's amazing I Am a Cat (recommended by the tutor in a Japanese language course I did many years ago), 'historical' epics like Outlaws of the Marsh (upon which the old TV series The Water Margin is based) and Three Kingdoms (from which sprung the videogames in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series), as well as collections of classics like Alice in Wonderland and The Three Musketeers. I've even read the odd bit of non-fiction, but that tends to be things like Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow.

There are many books by many authors that I'd never have encountered were it not for a recommendation, and I rarely give up on a book once I've started it. The last time that happened was Robert Lee Hall's Exit Sherlock Holmes... and it wasn't even because it wasn't any good, I just couldn't be bothered to finish it until my sister grudgingly gave me a massive spoiler which turned the story into Sci-Fi rather than a Sherlock Holmes story which barely featured Sherlock Holmes except as the subject of the mystery. Some recommendations have been more enjoyable that others, and some have led to me frantically searching out everything an author has ever written... but I've always read very slowly.

In part, this is because I tended only to read before bedtime, as a means of settling down in the evening. Even with the most riveting read, I'd tend to get through only a couple of pages before feeling the need to put my head down and get some kip.

Other opportunities to read may have presented themselves - long journeys by train or plane when going on holiday, for example - but I never really took advantage of them. Trains tend to send me to sleep and planes tend to be far too noisy for reading.

Then, at the beginning of this year, I had a temping placement close to Russell Square station in town. It's far from being the opposite end of the Piccadilly line, but the journey works out as almost exactly an hour on the train, without including any waiting time (of which there now tends to be little as I've got the timing of the journey sorted out). That's a full hour in which I can reliably sit and read and, as long as I've had enough sleep the night before, not fall asleep while doing so.

Which is convenient... Because, for Christmas, I got the first three of the four-volume Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson. The First and Second Chronicles must have taken me a couple of years to read because of their size, let alone because of Donaldson's exceptionally dense writing and unforgiving vocabulary. Despite my familiarity with the unconventional conventions of Fantasy Character Naming, it took a while for me to get used to oddities like 'High Lord Kevin Landwaster' and other names which raised an unintended smile. At first glance, bits of the Chronicles seem quite derivative of Tolkein, but Lord Foul the Despiser is a far trickier villain than Sauron, and far more deadly in his scheming. Furthermore, Donaldson himself admitted that he was teaching himself to write while writing, so one can forgive his earliest works for being a bit clumsy.

I started reading The Runes of the Earth as soon as I started working after Christmas and got through it surprisingly quickly, helped (strangely) by the fact that I knew some of what was coming because I'd read a Wikipedia page about the book. Then I read Fatal Revenant. Then I read Against All Things Ending. I'm pretty sure I'd got a good way through that last book by the time my temping job ended. I can't remember exactly how long it took now but, compared to the First and Second Chronicles, I'd blasted through them, averaging about forty pages per day (twenty on the way to work, another twenty on the way home). Needless to say, for me, that's pretty quick.

And once I'd got myself up to date on the events of The Land, I had a pile of books ready to start, some of which I'd bought at this year's PicoCon. There was the option to carry on my Donaldson binge with the Gap series, or try something a bit different. Perhaps I'm a bit late to the game, but I managed to find a copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer, and I'd also made the rather random purchase of Christopher Priest's The Prestige (I quite enjoyed the movie, after all, and books are invariably better than their movie adaptations). I began with the former, since it's so highly regarded, and was initially a little disappointed. I fear that, if it was adapted into a movie today, it would seem very samey. At its heart, it's a Sci-Fi Noir/Heist story - so it would be compared to Inception - with hints of Blade Runner to its dystopian view of the future. Many aspects of the cybernetic enhancement of humans present in Neuromancer have been borrowed by the likes of Ghost in the Shell and, more recently, videogames like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and, all too often in life, the source material for great ideas is heavily overshadowed by its derivatives. I'd say Ghost in the Shell, with its tale of an AI seeking asylum via a cybernetic body, owes a massive debt to Neuromancer. It was an enjoyable read, to be sure, and its realistically truncated dialogue was certainly unusual... but it didn't feel all that unique or groundbreaking due to the Noir/Heist basis of the story.

After than, I moved on to The Prestige... which is very different to the movie. A fair chunk of the story is set 'in the present day', though it still bases itself around the long-standing feud between two stage magicians of the late 1800s and early 1900s - Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. For most of  the book - written as Borden's notebook and Angier's diary - it's not even clear why it has been republished as part of Gollancz's SF Masterworks series because there's precious little Sci-Fi to be found until Angier gets sent looking for Nikola Tesla. The narrative is so unreliable - Borden clearly states that his notebook contains only that which he wants to be read, while Angier admits to destroying a good portion of his (early) entries - that, while it generally feels as though you're getting a good idea of what's happening, later pages reveal how little of what has gone before is accurate or truthful: Angiers tells tales of his horrific and life-threatening encounters with Borden which Borden apparently felt were not worthy of even a passing mention. The movie is a very much simplified and condensed version of the book and, during Angier's portion of the narrative, I was constantly wondering how close to the movie the ending would be. Some aspects of it seem a bit silly in comparison, but it was a great read. It seems Priest is considered something of a master of unreliable narrative, so I may well look up some of his other stuff...

So, the question of my reading now becomes a matter of whether my choices of early reading material were at fault, whether I need a situation where reading is the only viable form of occupying my mind,  whether I've improved over the years since I first started reading for pleasure, or whether the wiring of my brain is such that I'm better able to concentrate for longer periods of reading.

And, chances are, it's a combination of all of them...

...Though having two hours of reading time either side of my working day is certainly a big help in getting through a book quickly. It took maybe a couple of months to get through three volumes of Donaldson's latest Covenant books, but Neuromancer and The Prestige took about a week each...

...And since I finished The Prestige, I took under a week to read the first in Donaldson's Gap series... Chances are, I'll have finished the whole series before The Last Dark comes out in paperback.