I'm a-ready

Just finished the Horwitz a few minutes ago and now primed to begin my year. It was a really wonderful book - history writing at its finest. With such a lightness of touch, his almost-present presence in the text manages to bring to the fore all the crazy characters he meets in his trips across North and South America. And you get such a vivid picture of the places he visits. My American history isn't great but I feel like I've got a much clearer picture of it now: the triumph of a book like this!

So I think its a perfect book to end my usual reading patterns with. Tomorrow I'm off with People of the Book so now I have to give some thought to the rest of the list. But first I'd like to explain a bit more about the patterns mentioned above. My personality as a reader, if you like.

Having read the requisite Tolkein, Asimov, English lit classics and whatever pulp I could fit inbetween as a young fella, the first real adult connection I had with books was with the style-bending early works of the English 'brat pack' of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Iain Banks and Ian McEwan; along with other emerging po-mo authors like Dennis Potter, Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis and Donald Bartheleme. I loved the sexiness and violence of this new writing, it sort made me fel tough I guess, like Hip Hop on a car stereo turned up loud.

My next affair was with magic realism, and I was caught up in it like many others, although I eventually read further into Latin American writers like Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Luis Borges. This led me to Salman Rushdie, who I read almost exclusively for a while as I discovered his back catalogue (and because they're all so fucking long!). I next delved into Umberto Eco and even tried to read Foucault and Baudrillard at one point but I think I was finally out of my league.

More recently, as work and family etc. took up some of that free reading time, I had less chances to really explore one author or genre, so basically jumped from novel to novel, choosing mostly celebrated pieces, prize-winners and the like, and relying on recommendations of others. I definitely discovered some cool new authors in that time, while trying to keep up with the output of my faves also. I did feel that maybe Amis and Eco et. al. weren't really cutting it up like they did in their early pieces, although I think McEwan has remained potent the whole time. However, I think i was actually tiring of literature, becoming jaded with what I saw as self-conscious attempts to reinvigorate the scene, do something outrageous, write an epoch-making novel, create a new 'voice'.

So it went that I picked up a copy of Bill Bryson's History of Nearly Everything to read - a copy that had returned to me after being given to my stepfather for a birthday. And from then on, for about four years, up until just few months ago, I stopped reading fiction altogether. It wasn't all thanks to Bill; I would also add my brother who really disliked anything that wasn't backed-up by fact, and had asked me rhetorically a few years earlier "why would you want to read something someone made up when the truth is so amazing?!". I was also influenced by my buddy Wayne, who has a huge collection of military and other history books that he graciously allows me to freely borrow from. After many years of fiction, only reading newspapers and the odd quality magazine for my non-fiction diet, I started to read science, history - ancient and modern, politics and current events, anthropology, mathematics, anything that looked interesting and could be obtained. My crowning achievement, I think, was to lug all 1200 pages of Norman Davies's Europe: A History around Europe as my reading for my holiday there last year. It filled some very long flights, and ended up bent and bedraggled, but what a monster of a book, what a leviathan! Davies brings such a strong and compelling argument to his work and presents what is essentially a revolution in thought pertaining to the true origins and racial underpinning of the great continent.

But it wore me out! I grabbed a copy of an interesting-looking novel at the airport train station in Rome and read almost all of it on the flights home. haven't stopped reading fiction since! I have settled down to a pretty constant rhythm now of a couple of non-fiction (mainly military history) books followed by a few novels, then back as the mood takes me. Until now, that is. I won't be too prescriptive about the order of books - just work out a list and launch into it. I do think that I've had a fairly predictable reading history up until now, even my latter-day foray into non-fiction is supposedly common for folks of a certain age. But I feel that I have tried to keep challenging myself with the densest non-fiction and wildest fiction I could stand, and that this task is an obvious next step. And what to do after the year, I mean, on February 12 2010? Hopefully the subject of a later post. I am writing these without much editing, trying to just gush it all out in this blog, trying not to bore myself or you. I still have some questions I want to consider but not tonight. Tonight I displace dreams of battles between Conquistadors and Indians and prepare myself for tara tara, my Year of Reading Australianally. Or, thanks Tony; Geraldine, here I come!