On Our Way To Crazy

“I’m a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I’m scared they wouldn’t want to hang out with me if I stopped. (They’re interesting people, and they know a lot of interesting things. I would miss them.) I’m a writer, and I need to read, for inspiration and education and because I want to get better, and only books can teach me how. Sometimes, yes, I read to find things out – as I get older, I feel my ignorance weighing more heavily on me. I want to know what it’s like to be him or her, to live there or then. I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide – film can’t get in close enough.

But the most important reason of all, I think, is this. When I was nine years old, I spent a few unhappy months in a church choir. And two or three times a week, I had to sit through a sermon, delivered by an insufferable old windbag of a vicar. I thought it would last forever, and sometimes I thought it would kill me – that I would, quite literally, die of boredom. The only thing we were allowed for diversion was the hymnbook, and I even ended up reading it, sometimes. Books and comics had never seemed so necessary; even though I’d always enjoyed reading before then, I’d never understood it to be so desperately important for my sanity. I’ve never, ever gone anywhere without a book or magazine since. It’s taken me all this time to learn that it doesn’t have to be a boring one, whatever the reviews pages and our cultural commentators tell me.

Please, please: put it down. You’ll never finish it. Start something else.”