In Case of Emergency,
Bring Book
I grew up in a house full of books, and I’m thankful to my parents for that. Both my mother and father were constantly reading whenever they had spare time, though my mom, a librarian and onetime-school teacher, would also watch TV shows with my brother and I occasionally – Murder, She Wrote was our favorite. As for my dad, he watched the nightly news and golf on the weekends; otherwise he was in his burgundy leather armchair reading a novel he brought home from the library. I recall many a morning when my dad would show up to breakfast bleary-eyed, admitting that he had stayed up late to finish a book. My parents’ tastes are limited almost solely to murder mysteries, and I often tease them that there is plenty of great literature out there that doesn’t involve a gruesome death and a detective. Although I would marvel at the fine craftsmanship of an Agatha Christie and enjoy the playfulness of The Cat Who… series, I tried not to stick to one genre. Despite my parents’ one-track tastes, their example put the love of reading in my blood, as well as my brother’s.
The first “big boy” book I read was Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. I read this when I was 8 or so, and all of my friends marveled that I had read a book with actual chapters. One that didn’t have pictures on every page. I quickly moved on to Fudge and Superfudge.
Like my parents, I read every chance I could. Unless I was home sick from school, I wouldn’t veg out in front of the television set. When I wasn’t playing outside, I was curled up on the loveseat in the living room. The living room had white carpet and a formal feel and everything in there was blue and white. It was like something out of Colonial Williamsburg, and it bothered me that it wasn’t ever used. So it became my reading room. My tastes ranged from stories of delight (My Father’s Dragon, the sadly out-of-print The Shades) to the utterly lowbrow (Truly Tasteless Jokes Three).
My father is not a shopper. Whenever we went to the mall, he’d park himself on a bench, pull out the paperback he had brought along, and would read until the rest of my family had finished our business. He was eager to encourage my reading habits and pledged to always buy me a book if I wanted one whenever we went to the mall. He later regretted this promise, and I actually felt so bad for depleting his wallet that I would limit my book requests to every other visit to the mall.
Following my father’s example, I never went anywhere without a book. I pitied people who would tell me that they got sick if they read in the car. Weaklings! I would never let that happen to me! There was nothing more depressing than when the sun set and we weren’t home yet. My dad refused to let me have a light on in the backseat – he said it distracted him too much as he drove – so whenever we passed a streetlight, I would quickly read across one line as the page was illuminated in an all-too-brief slash of light.
When I was in fifth through eighth grade, I read more fantasies than anything else. Gifted with an active imagination, I found something so appealing about an alternate world, filled with magic and monsters. I played Dungeons & Dragons during these years, and would initiate make-believe forays with my friends in the forest behind our houses. How I longed to live in a world that was so much more exciting than this one! Greek and Roman mythology became a passion – I especially liked how human the gods were, imbued with superpowers and immortality, but bogged down by lust, pride, jealousy and other mortal misgivings. Howard Pyle’s legends of King Arthur became dog-eared from having been read so often.
Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels also delighted me, with their coy allusions to this world (Xanth was suspiciously shaped like Florida), and the clever way they made puns literal – money did, indeed, grow on trees, and centaurs, for example, were the result of a pairing of a horse and human who had drank from a love spring. In addition, everyone in Xanth had some sort of magic talent, no two the same. I spent many hours dreaming about what my talent would have been.
Another series that enchanted me was Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance novels. They were set in a D&D world, filled with colorful characters (Tanis Half-Elven, torn between two races; Tasslehoff, a hobbit-like goofball who “accidentally” found others’ possessions in his pockets; and Raistlin, a wizard with hourglass pupils that showed him only death and decay). Why, oh why was our world devoid of magic?
It was this desire to enchant the mundane world that got me into the occult. My best friend’s little sister, Michelle, and I would share books on ghosts, ESP, superstitions and the supernatural while I was in junior high. As I entered high school and moved from Seattle to the Bay Area, I befriended a girl named Stephanie, who would spend days with me at the local library. We’d beeline for the occult section and whisper over books we found on witchcraft. If wicca had been more popular at the time, I’m sure we would have actually attempted some spells. As it was, we were content to merely read dusty grimoires, our imaginations running wild. We both felt as if we were doing something that would be frowned upon, and that thrill of rebellion was enough to sate us. We read Jay’s Journal, put out by the same woman who “discovered” Go Ask Alice. Jay gets deeper and deeper into the occult, and there’s a scene in which one of his friends, using only her mind, makes one glass after another fall off a shelf and shatter on the ground. Stephanie and I didn’t quite believe the tale…but we certainly wanted to.
A couple of the novels of Bret Easton Ellis struck a major chord within me. In high school, I first read Less Than Zero, and I yearned desperately to be like Clay – especially when I went away to college in a small town in Ohio. I was a friendly, jovial, outgoing guy, but inside I was harboring the secret that I was gay, and this repression tinged every experience with misery. You can go about your daily life, but it’s awful to always have to pretend to be something you’re not. That’s why I found tragic literary characters so appealing: Salinger’s Franny, in the midst of a nervous breakdown; Edna in The Awakening, feeling trapped by society’s constraints and suicidal; and Clay. Clay was a beautiful boy who lost himself in cocaine abuse and sexual encounters with both sexes. He was quiet, mysterious. I wanted to be mysterious, too. In fact, in the poetic, angst-ridden letters I’d write to my high school friend Stephanie, I would call myself Clay.
In my post-collegiate life, I have continued to read voraciously. When I first graduated, I recall being elated that I could once again read for pleasure. (As an English Lit major, I was inundated with required texts, not all of them enjoyable.) Fantasies no longer held their appeal (though I eagerly devoured every Anne Rice novel), and I am still somewhat drawn to troubled characters. Once I came out of the closet and relocated to a big city, where I saw, for the first time, that living an openly gay life could be so normal, I suppose I needed those escapes less. For that’s exactly what they were – escapes from my oxymoronic existence: I was always the boy who was smiling on the outside but crying on the inside.
When I first got out of college, I actually missed my classes and the process of learning. With the idea of being a lifelong student, I made certain to read a lot of non-fiction. My main passion, from the time I was a child reading about the exploits of Hercules, to my high school obsession with witchcraft, has been world religions and folklore. I worked my way through many of Joseph Campbell’s books, though nowadays I don’t have the patience for them. After college I was used to that dry scholastic diction, but when I pick up my copy of Occidental Mythology, I find my mind wandering too often. I used to have multiple books going at the same time, and I’d try to cover my bases, with, say, Don’t Know Much About the Bible, Generation X and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Since I’ve been in my 30s, though, I’ve turned into a one-book-at-a-time type of guy.
It has only been in the last decade or so that I’ve really gotten into graphic novels. There’s just something about the combination of amazing art and interesting storytelling that appeals to me. I’ve been weeding out many of the books in my collection (my favorite thing to do is put a Bookcrossing.com label on them and leave them somewhere to be found by a stranger), but I cannot part with my graphic novel and comic book collection. The first graphic novels I read were Art Spiegelman’s Maus volumes; I think he was one of the first authors to help graphic novels gain credibility. From there, I discovered Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, David Boring, Ice Haven), Richard Sala (Evil Eye), Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve), Mike Mignola (Hellboy, B.P.R.D.), Alan Moore (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and Frank Miller (Sin City). I tend to be drawn to those who weave a warped tale to go along with eye-catching artwork. Aside from a few awesome Batman tales (The Long Halloween, Frank Miller’s contributions), and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, I’ve never been too impressed with superheroes.
A Means of Escape
It’s strange to me that I never made a connection between all of the types of books that I loved to read while growing up. Now, though, it seems so glaringly obvious: They were all ways of coping with my repression, means of forgetting my burden, if even for a little while. And where better to escape than to a world much like this one, but imbued with magic? Places where being different was accepted – the fact that I liked boys wouldn’t be such a big deal in a realm filled with various races and monsters that were a mishmash of various animals. What’s the big deal with being gay when compared with being half-woman, half-eagle? Or half-man, half-horse?
I never understood why fantasy and science fiction were always grouped together. I wanted no part in those stories of space travel and alien planets. They were too dependent upon science and logic; they seemed cold and calculated to me. Give me magic spells and dangerous monsters any day.
My early interest in mythology and books of fantasy – how I yearned to find a magical armoire that would open up into a magical world, like the Pevensie kids in the Chronicles of Narnia – led directly to my interest in the occult and the paranormal. It was a thrill to think that magic and the fantastical might exist right here, in this world! As I grew older and more scholarly, this fascination developed into an interest in the various folklore, mythology and religions of the world, both past and present. I still hold all of these interests, but they no longer consume the majority of my reading habits. Living as an openly gay man relieved me of the need to slip into my imagination to cope with reality.
Freed from the burden of my repression, I feel that I can better appreciate literature on its own merits. Favorite authors of my adulthood include Bukowski (this misogynistic drunk writes amazing prose, and pretty much the only poetry, besides Dickinson and Whitman, that connects with me), Palahniuk, Murakami. After reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, I understood why it had won the Pulitzer. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife remain two of the books I quickly offer when friends ask for reading suggestions.
Another of the reasons I love to read is that authors are celebrities, but unlike actors and rock stars, they are actually accessible. Now and then, I’ll feel inspired enough to pen a letter to an author. When I read The Cat Who… murder mysteries in high school, I simply had to let Lillian Jackson Braun know that I, too, had a Siamese named Koko (actually, I spelled mine Co-Co), who I suspected might be psychic as well, and that I shared her love of the paranormal and the French language. She wrote me back with the name of the adorable little old lady who translated her books into French – and I actually looked her up on a class trip to Paris, visiting her apartment on the Champs-Elysées, where she fed me petits gâteaux, one after the other. Another time, in my early 20s, I wrote to Francesca Lia Block and told her that her rock ’n’ roll urban fairy tales inspired me, and she replied, praising my writing ability – a compliment that has remained a source of pride. I also attend many author readings, which as allowed me to meet Anne Rice (I had to wait in line for three hours), Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Chuck Palahniuk (hands down, the most entertaining), Lynda Barry (truly inspiring), John Berendt, Douglas Coupland. That’s pretty cool.
To this day, I rotate a book from my nightstand, where I read every night before bed, to my messenger bag – and if, for some godforsaken reason I forget my book at home, I am absolutely miserable during my hour-long el ride to work. It literally drives me crazy if I cannot read. Reading is, and always will be, one of the main driving forces of my life. Even without my longing to escape the secret that burned a hole inside of me for so many years, old habits die hard. Reading’s not something I want, so much as it’s something I need.
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