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.