How I Rediscovered Reading Fiction — and How I Ultimately Rediscovered Writing It (Part One)

It was 13th April 2016. I know this because I kept the receipt in the book I bought that day, a book that would end up changing my life.

I don’t know why I wandered into the fiction section in Waterstones — perhaps it was a means of avoiding doing my usual thing as a undergraduate and then as a postgraduate of going straight to the Philosophy section and briefly dipping into a few things before leaving with nothing, which by then had become very tiresome.

I had found myself in the “B” area and for some reason a suitable name drifted to the front of my consciousness: Borges. I had never read any Borges at all, even though I had always wanted to, and I found myself pulling a Penguin edition of Doctor Brodie’s Report off the shelf and sitting down in one of their overstuffed leather chairs with it. I turned to the title story and began to read. I had become possessed, enraptured. This was not a work of intellectual history! This would not help my career in that area, or in political philosophy, or in any academic zone relevant to my supposed interests. But I read on none the less, almost in a trance. “Doctor Brodie’s Report” is fundamentally a story about anthropology and ideology — a primitive tribe of peoples living in a vaguely described land who not only cannot conceive of complex ideas, but cannot conceive of anything that exists outside of the natural world they know of — and written in what I later learned was Borges’ common style of the ‘false document’. I think it was this “non-fiction” way of presenting the story that ultimately kept my interest to the end. I read it in about fifteen minutes and put the book down on the coffee table in front of me, feeling emotional. It was the first short story I had read in many years, and it felt like I had returned to an earlier part of my life. I felt youthful for the first time in a while, even though I was then only 23. I felt refreshed, emboldened. I had recovered something. For the first time since I was a teenager, my hands had brushed against my own soul, and felt the warmth that dwelt beneath its softly shredded folds.

I can actually pinpoint when I stopped reading fiction to October 2011. I had moved into my university share flat and had gotten started on my PPE course (although by the end of the academic year it was just to be the PP, me having proven weak at economic theory and even weaker at dealing with the arrogance and lack of imagination of the Business School in which it was taught). One Saturday afternoon I realised that I had not read a single jot of fiction in the past two months, and that I should take one of the novels I had brought with me off the shelf and dig in. I had previously since the age of 13 made it my imperative to ensure the intake of at least one short story or thirty or so pages of a novel a day (not that this rule was consistently kept).

As I lay down on my uncomfortable, raucous, rusty spring-twisted mattress my mistake came in which book I took off the shelf: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut.

I began to read and got to about page ten, after which I put it down and never returned to it. At the time I didn’t understand it — I still don’t frankly. My previous two Vonnegut novels — Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle — were two of my favourites, as was his short story “Harrison Bergeron”, which I still rank amongst my most beloved short stories. But for whatever reason, at that exact moment, it proved the wrong book for me to read. I don’t blame the book, however; I blame myself. After such a break from fiction, I should’ve restarted with something else, something a little more ‘conventional’, or ‘fun’, such as Stephen King’s Nightshift (which still sits unread on the shelf ten years after purchasing it, and from that very same Waterstones on Deansgate I had sat down in to read Borges); I could’ve then returned to it yearning for something more challenging. But that was not the case.

That book and the other fiction remained there until the end of the year, at which point I returned them to my room in the familial home. When I moved into my second year digs I took no fiction at all with me, but by then, I had found a means to justify this new separation.

It was simple, and George Carlin had put it to me (to paraphrase): a serious man should not be interested in other people’s imaginations or dreams. He should be interested in the world as hit really is, and only read books to that effect. That meant science, history, philosophy…the real things of the human experience.

However, in all honesty, I just used this as a justification for bad behaviour, having come across this snippet many months after effectively stopping reading fiction. It was also the case, as alluded to before, that I got it into my head that I should only read things helpful to my career prospects, which was, at this time, to become an academic philosopher, specialising in political and moral philosophy (and, if possible, a few other things).

In spite of all this, as the years dragged on, I never rid myself of the vast library of fiction I had acquired throughout my teenage years, which included (and still includes) hundreds of novels and single author collections, dozens of anthologies, and a small but I like to think nifty collection of original copies of SF magazines (mostly Fantasy and Science Fictions, but also some Interzones, Analogs, Fantastic Universes, Ifs, and even an ancient Astounding Science Fiction with a Murray Leinster as the title story). I always knew I wanted to return to them, some day, but all through the years of being an undergrad, then being unemployed, then briefly being a working stiff for the Royal Mail, then being unemployed again, and then finally ‘fulfilling the dream’ and going to do graduate studies in London, I never sort the comfort they had once given me.

All the time wasted arguing with strangers on the internet. All the time re-watching clips from TV shows I’d seen a dozen times before. All the time obsessing over the pettiest minutia in political history and philosophical biography. All of it I justified as opposed to reading fiction because, in the end, it would add up to something: the arguments would toughen me up; the clips would relieve the stresses and keep me anchored in the real world; the minutia would give me an edge.

Ignoring fiction meant that I was supposed to focusing on the non-fiction that would buttress my prospective career, giving me the raw material for future research and a foundation for my own body of work. In reality, stopping reading fiction made my non-fiction reading practices lethargic. It was rare I finished a book cover to cover, instead dipping in and out. Frequently I barely touched even assigned texts, and often did work based on secondary sources when a primary citation was most adequate, because the secondary sources were more condensed and more directly indexed for the information required. Exactness, nuance, and contextuality often went out the window. In the long run, my reading skills overall suffered along with the overall quality of my academic output, and only got worse when I started my MA degree. I could not take to reading large texts quickly — having fed myself on an endless diet of newspaper articles and Icon Introducing… books — and left me with an inability to contribute properly to seminars (I was the silent creep, the dark horse, the placeholder-man, the possible and likely fraud…). Although my degree was ultimately awarded with a “Merit” (around a 67% average mark), I feel I could’ve done a lot better quality and possibly quantity of work had I consistently practiced my reading skills (along with my information absorption and retention skills) while indulging in a daily intake of good fiction.

It was in fact on a brief break from my studies in London that I had wandered into the fiction section at Waterstones and read that Borges story that had proved such a spontaneous revelation. I knew immediately that I had to indulge in Borges as much as I could, not just because he spoke to me, but because I knew I couldn’t let this pass. I had connected with something wonderful, energy-imparting, something mildly immortal. Borges was in that moment the messiah, and I needed his teachings. (This post could’ve easily been called “How Borges Saved My Life”, but let’s try not to be too over-dramatic.)

I put the copy of Doctor Brodie’s Report back — it was quite creased and bent from what must have been a couple of years on the shelf — and instead picked up a small 75 page Penguin Modern Classics sampler of his work called The Widow Ching-Pirate. It had “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, a story I had meant to read since I was about 15, and it was only £3. If Borges proved to be not what I imagined it would not be so much of a financial loss, but it turned out at the till that with the backlog of points on my Waterstones loyalty card, I could actually get it for free.

I started reading “Tlön…” on the coach back to London later that night, and finished it the next night. I have since read the story three times in total and consider it my favourite of all the short fiction that I have read (I estimate it at least three thousand individual short stories in total over a sixteen year period, give or take few hundred). Even as I type this, I feel I could start reading it again right this second.

When I had finished it in bed on the very first reading, I decided I would read one more story and then go to sleep. Within in an hour I had read the other four stories in the book, and found myself hungry for more.

An incredible sensation had come over me, an unbelievable sense of freedom. All throughout my teen years, I had stuck almost exclusively to speculative fiction — science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream, and the things in-between — and only occasionally indulged in more literary or realistic fiction out of curiosity or maybe in error. I realised all the literary works I had put on a mental to-do list could now be read. I was an adult man with spare money and nothing better to do in his spare time than to re-seek that joy he had once had daily. Reading Borges had proved it to be a simple affair: see the book, remember the mental list, buy the book, and read it. It was genius!

But I had wasted so much time, four and a half years in fact; I had to get on with it!

I got on my Amazon app and ordered some of the works I had long denied myself.

Within a day they had arrived: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

It took me a week to read Conrad: I found his prose over-written, and his narrative often distracted by trivialities.

I moved onto James’ novella; it also took me a week, and I found a lot of it wanting and also over-written (supposedly somewhere James admitted in a letter to H.G. Wells that he had written it as sensationalist doggerel meant to pay the bills, which would explain a lot).

The 19 year old me would’ve given up again, but I soldiered on. I wanted to maintain that feeling, get that freedom back, touch what had long been left untouched and forgotten.

I opened up an AbeBooks account, having previously been too suspicious of it to use the site, and ordered what would be my first novel for close to five years: The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton. It arrived fast, a beautiful 1946 Penguin Orange edition, and I read it in four short sittings. It was just wonderful, funny, thrilling even, and actually appealed to me as a student of intellectual history with its oblique references to conflicts within Victorian and Edwardian thought and politics. After finishing it I ordered The Man Who Was Thursday, and couldn’t help but read it as soon as it arrived. Not only was it amazingly better than Napoleon, it may in fact be my favourite novel as of right now, more than two years after finishing it.

My mum visiting me a month later brought my immaculate copy of Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov to my London room, and I realised what had made me admire that great Russian so many years after reading “The Malefactor” in sixth form college (still one of my favourite short stories).

I also found myself reading poetry seriously for the first time, and made my first attempt in nine years in reading T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems — and later, still fascinated, read his Collected Poems.

I read several Dahl books that no one had read to me in childhood, and felt angry at missing out on.

As the months went on and I returned to Manchester, I read more Conrad (I still believe now I can ‘conquer’ him), and more Chesterton.

I read Joyce’s Dubliners after long ago dismissing “The Sisters” as incomprehensible, and I incorporated “The Dead” into my literary canon.

I came back to H.G. Wells and Philip K. Dick after years of absence from them — it was less like seeing old friends as much as having them rise from the dead.

I read my first play outside of secondary school — Beckett’s Waiting for Godot — and still must read many more.

I read Hunter S. Thompson for the first time, never having laughed so much and so loudly at a book before, but the most important figure came in the form of Bukowski. His Post Office is one of the most important novels I’ve ever read. It spoke so directly to me having been a mail-sorting drone myself — although I had the relative comfort of hot desking in a stale office for only a month and a half, while “Hank” for years had to drive through a flooded Los Angeles cityscape and drag a mailbag through the dog-and-senile-old-woman-ridden streets, before having to endure the horror of the “Scheme” as a mail clerk.

I closed off 2016 by finishing Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve.

I’ve since then read another 43 books, 34 of them fiction and poetry. In fact, in the whole of 2018, I’ve not finished off an entire non-fiction book — not for the want of trying (I don’t want things to go the other way). I try to read or listen to fiction and poetry every single day — even if it’s just the one poem or the one piece of flash fiction. It’s a habit for life, one I’ve rediscovered, but there’s another habit for life I used to have that I’ve rediscovered in the last year: that of writing.

To be continued…