Books and Reading - Part Two

I didn’t think the world of reading could get much better after Frank and Joe Hardy. But enter the Wild West worlds of Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, and Max Brand and all that changed. The western frontier became my world. Imagining cowboy boots, leather vests, six guns, horses, saddles and coffee pots on open fires replaced the teenage sleuths and mysteries. My imagination began to live in the wild wilderness quite a distance from life as a suburban kid trying to fit in. The relentless hostility of life in the west facing hunger, exhaustion, the elements, and two and four legged predators wouldn’t let my imagination alone. The romance of western life had taken over—or at least in what I liked to read.

The list of paperback novels was endless. Another one was always at the ready at the library, the bookrack at the pharmacy or on my aunt and uncle’s bookshelves. Riders of the Purple Sage and The Trail Driver, Long Ride Home and Hondo, The Man From Mustang and The Gold Trail. The list didn’t stop nor did my near insatiable appetite for the west and the outdoor life. Many a summer’s night I went to sleep in front of a wood campfire on my rolled out blanket with my head on my leather saddle with infinite pinpoints of starlight lighting the night sky. Could life be grander—I thought not—but what is youth if not for our imaginations.

I then found Peter Maas’s Serpico on a bookshelf at a family friend’s cottage that, for me, brought the wildness of the west into the modern city. It seemed closer to the world I knew—and one of real human drama. An adult book, I was maybe thirteen or fourteen but captivated by the explicitness of the brutality and violence of one life fighting another. Guns and cowboys became frighteningly real.

It was about this time that music began to sneak into my life. Not from the Conservatory of Music piano lessons I took once a week at the behest of my parents but from the likes of Elton John, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Kiss and The Beatles. Like the Wild West, it was new and incredible to my young mind. Music took me to that other place not unlike the Wild West where songwriters, like cowboys, played in another world but seemingly closer to my own. What these songwriters wrote about, put to music and performed only made this imagined world inside my head more real. It was a place I needed and wanted to go, similar to space for some or the ocean for others. They were the cowboys that I could actually emulate. Now it was more than just stories; lyrics and poetry took me away, something could come from mere words and music.

What happened next though changed my world of books and reading—and music forever. There was no going back as you’ll see in Part Three of Books, Reading & Music.   
 

Books and Reading - Part One

Books and Reading - Part One

I didn’t start reading particularly early, at least that’s what my mother says, but my love for books did. As family folklore has it, at four years old I was found in my bed one night under the blankets with a flashlight and a copy of Winston Churchill’s memoir in my hands. I’m sure I was looking at the pictures of course but who knew it was the beginning of a life long love of books.

My first memories of books are from my mother. She often read to me and my siblings from a vast selection that included classics like Beatrice Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar’s Stories and of course favorites from the Dr. Seuss catalogue like Horton Hears A Who!, The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. I can recall the anxiousness of our weekly trips to the library excited by the countless shelves of books to choose from. But most of all what I remember from those early days was the monthly anticipation of what book would come in the mail from the “Beginner Books” series. Many of the titles remain indelibly marked in my memory: Come Over to My House, Sam and The Firefly, Stop That Ball! and A Fish Out Of Water to name but a few. They all captured my imagination and allowed me to go to that “other place” for a while.

My first memories of reading come in early elementary school with Fun with Dick and Jane series that led me back to “reading” the many titles my mother had already introduced me to. I read all of the books many times over in those early first years. It was my “other” world, though I don’t remember recognizing it as such. Then I remember a particular book from the “Beginner Books” series You Will Go To The Moon that led to the classic Danny and the Dinosaur and a fascination with space and science. The pictures made the stories come to life and the words I could now read made the pictures even more real. Reading and books were wonderful fun.

But then, like life, things changed.

In retrospect, it’s hard to discern exactly what took place. More words and fewer pictures were the trend in school. I began reading only for school. The fun of reading replaced by what looked a lot like work. Most of my reading was from textbooks. Oddly, I don’t remember much from those years.

And I don’t remember how long it lasted—but things changed again.

And change for the better they did. It was Frank W. Dixon’s (aka Leslie MacFarlane) Hardy Boys series that flipped my world upside down. My first Hardy Boy book was a birthday present. Reluctant to pick it up—reading meant school that meant work—it wasn’t long before I couldn’t get enough of Frank and Joe’s adventures. There were many: The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff and The Shore Road Mystery being amongst my favourite. I read dozens of them. Saving my allowance to buy each new hardcover released. It was probably the start of my preference for hardcovers to this day.

No doubt, MacFarlane’s ability to suspend my disbelief eventually finding it’s way into my own work.

But what happened next, rocked my world, and will follow in Part Two of Books and Reading.