My Reading Life

Always a troublesome relationship with books. I have picked up Henry Miller’s “The Books in My Life” — everything written by Henry Miller intoxicates me (which is certainly his intention) and this book is no different. If anything it inspires me to take a closer look at my own writing and reading life.

I was drawn to books very early, the first and most notable being the Harry Potter series when I was in elementary school. I liked studying, I liked math, and I liked reading. The Scholastic Book Fair, a kind of traveling bookshop, would show up twice a year at our school and though I was often distracted by the non-book items they brought, but I always ended up with a small stack of Magic Treehouse or Goosebumps.

I got a bit more obsessive about reading once I was in 6th grade — I had more questions than my parents and teachers could answer, so I pillaged each library I went to, checking out as many books that I thought would contribute to my well-being and my overall power. I was a small child (still a small adult, too), and I found that to level the playing field with bullies, I would have to engage in psychological warfare. I read self-help books, military strategy books, and the manifestos of artists. One of those artists, one that I found particularly influential, was Keri Smith, who most famously wrote “Wreck This Journal”, a book meant to be defaced. My favorite book of hers was “How To Be an Explorer of the World”, which contained daily prompts for collecting mundane objects from your life in order to create a kind of personal museum in your home. Draw maps of sidewalk cracks, take inventory of the things you notice on walks, collect bottle caps and catalog them. Keri Smith showed me that the world was endlessly interesting, and sometimes all that you needed to do to restore your sense of wonder is to take the mundane and put it into an exquisite frame (to use Brian Eno’s words).

In middle school I became preoccupied with love. I have a distinct and somewhat embarrassing memory of ordering “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff in Love” by Richard Carlson, a self-help guru who wrote a series of books under the “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” franchise. I read nearly all of them, and they resonated with me a lot as I was a person who constantly was sweating the small stuff. I ordered “DSTSS in Love” and picked it up from the library, and as they handed it to me they asked “Is this the right book you ordered?” I felt very small, silly, and young. The book was certainly geared towards adults, but I needed to know how to function when love was in the air, when my adolescent self was keenly interested in holding hands with girls.

I knew I wanted to be an artist, this much was clear. But I felt I had so much more to offer than just art — I was a good student, shy but consciously involved in many clubs and social spheres, and extremely motivated to do things my way. I dreamt of being a movie director, and so I checked out yet another life changing book called “Filmmaking For Teens”. It was well put together, and focused on pitfalls that teens encounter when they are making their first films. The thesis: write a fucking script, keep the film under 5 minutes. If you can do this, they wrote, you have the battle half-won.

Freshman year of high school, I remember being assigned “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley and not connecting with it at all. Same with Shakespeare. I was frustrated that these supposedly “great” works were incomprehensible to me, and I found that I had a much better time reading the Cliff’s Notes for much of this assigned reading. It wasn’t until junior year when my AP English teacher assigned me “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien that I started to love my assigned reading. “The Things They Carried”, to high-school me, was a book about writing, memory, and distrust of oneself. I loved how fluid and foggy the writing was, and it made me feel like I was unraveling a mystery with the author (the mystery of himself!). Around this time I was listening to NPR and heard David Sedaris’s famous Christmas stories, which spurred me to read every single thing David Sedaris had published. Sedaris was funny, insightful, and proof to me that you could be a “successful” and renown author while being kind of a dipshit in school. I worked very hard at school, and felt like there was a lot of pressure for me to perform at an exceptional level. I was freed by my favorite authors who shunned school, who failed miserably at it — they showed me that education and schooling were entirely different things.

I tried writing essays in the style of David Sedaris, and published a couple silly, pointless zines that my friend and neighbors bought. I remember being baffled as to what people wanted to read. What compelled someone to continue reading? When I wrote my essays, I noticed that there was no point, no lingering message or purpose other than painting a scene. I started picking up books and articles on writing. I remember reading “the way to keep a reader engaged is to at the beginning promise them cake, in the middle talk about whatever you want to talk about, and then at the end deliver the cake that you promised.” Though I don’t always follow this rule, it was one of the first bits of writing scaffolding that I internalized.

Throughout my teens I wrote constantly. I read in my cognitive neuroscience books that sometimes folks with brain tumors developed hypergraphia, an affliction in which one cannot stop writing. I wrote so much, obsessively, that I entertained the possibility that there was something extremely wrong (or right) with my brain that compelled me to sit down for hours and just write. Today, I have tubs of journals that I wrote in religiously. They are hard to read as an adult, mostly because they are the neurotic and adolescent worries that often end in tirades. Regardless, I love looking at the tubs full of notebooks as they proved to me that yes, I was indeed a writer.

There is too much to discuss when it comes to my relationship with books. There are my favorite “Young Adult” genre’d novels, there are the hardcore academic texts that I was pressured to read, and then there was a tremendous amount of “catch up” reading I did once I attended college. The hope here, today, is to get that conversation rolling, and to bring forth some of those original beloved tomes in order to help inform my present.

I am turning 30 very soon. It’s an exciting, scary birthday. I’ve drastically upended my life in the past year in preparation for 30 — I wanted to enter these adult years feeling like an adult. I have invested in “adult” clothes — things that people I admire seem to wear when I am serving them coffee. I got rid of the keychain I got from the orthodontist and exchanged it for a leather strap. I got the tattoo that I had dreamt of since college. I invested in my integrity, my mobility, and my freedom. And yet, I feel lost — sometimes I don’t know who I am or what I like, and so I am revisiting my journals and re-reading some of my favorite books. This nurtures my soul, and every time I re-read a passage from Mary Ruefle’s “Madness, Rack, and Honey” (a beloved book), I find I remember more of who I am and what I like.

Gosh, what happened over the past five years? A breakup, a move, the pandemic, another breakup. I lost my interest in reading and writing and instead focused on making money and marketing myself as a credible internet person. Now, my trajectory seems so different, it is cloudier, more of a mystery. In these times of great uncertainty, I find it is helpful to look at my own personal history to see if I can identify an indicator as to where I will land next.

I am always interested in starting fresh, a new, reborn every three to four years. This is perhaps a product of my own self-destructive tendencies, but it harkens back to something that I read in a Keri Smith book (probably “How to Be an Explorer of the World”). “You can reinvent yourself at any time,” she wrote. I took this to heart, but I found that re-inventing yourself every couple years is extremely tiresome. Best to take a look to see what skills and passions you have accumulated, and then to make a decision based on what you have invested your time in. This is part of growing older, I think.

However, it is so difficult to commit to a single one of these selves. Connor-the-writer. Connor-the-internet-lad. Connor-the-barista. Connor-the-artist. Each self has its own haunts, its own goals, its own social sphere, its own style. I like being able to take off one mask in exchange for another, and I have found it more freeing to segment myself than to create one, fully accurate and self-actualized Connor. I am all of my selves, and my selves are often at odds with one another.

This is perhaps a by-product of living so many different lives through all the books I have read. I have heard so many inspiring and dazzling stories that motivate me to experience the world and to live fully and fearlessly. I want to travel, I want to eat good food, I want to meet everyone, I want to love courageously, with abandon! Simultaneously, I want to be a recluse, I want to be a grumpy old man, I want to while my days away with only my books and my pets. I cannot pick just one life, which leaves me currently at home, living with my parents in a small, sleepy town, and daydreaming.