Long before The DaVinci Code was a twinkle in Dan Brown’s checking account, I’d already read all about it in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, thanks to my dad.
Like most people I’m a lot of things because of him and another lot of things despite him; but one of the biggest entries on the “because of” side of the ledger is a voracious and wide ranging reader with an analytical turn of mind. Dad didn’t read much fiction, let alone mystery fiction. But he read just about everything else: from George Plimpton’s Paper Tiger to Erich von Däniken's Chariot of the Gods, with vast chunks of history, science, biography and social sciences in between. There was always a stack of books by his bed and his favorite chairs, with him usually working on a couple of different ones at a time. I was encouraged to borrow any of them and to talk with him about them or anything else I was reading. Every year for Christmas I got a copy of the New York Times Book Review special Christmas / Year in Review edition and the number of books I could ask him to order for me. And when I was younger and not responsive to other punishments, my library card got taken away.
I know all the reasons people assume small town America is a great place to raise kids, but the reality isn't that simple. Me, I mostly felt trapped there. We had no public transportation to let you escape and pretty limited entertainment options. A dairy farm next door and a lot of bars, but no movie theater, almost no stores, not even a McDonalds to hang out it. All those books were like a combination "get out of jail" card and magic carpet, letting me escape and find worlds very different from the seeming trap around me. I read a lot more fiction than Dad did, but even there variety was the watchword, everything from Hemingway to Eric Frank Russell (a sadly forgotten golden age SF author who wrote some hilariously cynical stories about human nature), from Gavin Lyall to Jane Austen.
It’s a great legacy. You hear a lot about kids not reading enough and about leading by example to provide role models for them (as a major sports fan I see the latter phrase so often I’ve thought of coming up with a variation on buzzword bingo based on how the phrase is used in context), but I’m not sure people put the two together often enough. It’s one thing to tell your kids to read more or put them in reading programs where other people tell them. It's another thing entirely to let them see you simply reading as an assumed part of your daily life, like sleeping and eating. That's how it becomes a part of their life too rather than something they do just because they have to for school or to stop someone nagging.
I also hear a lot of people say they’d love to read more if they only had the time, when the truth is they do have the time, they just do other things with it. If you assume reading as part of your life then you find time for it. Which is why, thanks to my dad's example, 10 minutes of idle time waiting for a bus or for dinner to finish cooking is as much reading time as a planned couple of hours basking in the sun to feed my inner lizard. Not a big deal and no regrets about not always having a lot of time for it, you just do it.
My mom read too. But it was as likely to be a magazine as a book, and if it was a book it was almost always a doorstop family saga or glittering society sort of thing. No doubt I read because of her example too, but there's even less doubt that I'm the kind of reader I am today because of my dad.
Thanks again, Dad!!
