My father never took me fishing, and for that I will be eternally grateful. What he did pass on to me though, was a love of reading, that ability to lose oneself for hours in the written word. It’s a pastime I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid; I even rode my bike to the library to spend hours thumbing through the musty books.
Most of my reading from that time was of history, and I mistook my pasttime for a love of history. It wasn’t until high school when I discovered authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and even Franz Kafka. Many of my friends at the time were engrossed in Khalil Gibran, but that did nothing for me. I would have rather gone fishing. Books, and their authors, have come and gone over the years. Some resurface from time to time; Hemingway, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Graham Greene are some that never grow old no matter how many times I read them.
But for all of my apparent fixation for the “Dead White Guy Canon,” I’m always on the lookout for the next great author. I confess to a predisposition for male authors, but that doesn’t mean that I shun female authors. Of the roughly 30 books I read last year – I average two to three books per month; I never said I was a fast reader – approximately half of those were written by female authors. I can’t remember their names, but I can’t remember the male author’s names either (I don’t count Keith Richards or Andre Agassi as authors). I’ll try any book if it sounds interesting . . . provided that it’s no more than 400 pages.
This article appears in Jul 7-13, 2011.