My parents didn’t own a lot of books. My Dad didn’t read at all, except for the evening newspa­per,  which he scanned from cover to cover each night sitting in his recliner in his under­shirt. I never thought of him as a liter­ate man, until one summer when I worked with him at the Fertil­izer Plant in south-east Calgary. During smoke breaks when the crews would gather in the old wooden shed between the Machine Shop and Warehouse, my father Johnny would often make comments on current affairs, with which, to my surprise, he was quite famil­iar. At home (I suspect as a way of isolat­ing himself from Mom’s inces­sant need to chatter), he said little, and seldom engaged in conver­sa­tion with either of us, except occasion­ally to mumble or grunt a monosyl­labic response to something Mom or I said.

At work, however, my father was like a differ­ent person — almost gregar­i­ous, admired and looked-up to by all of his co-workers. This came, in part, from having worked at the plant longer than nearly every­one else, in the company’s employ for close to forty years by then. But I believe what others valued about my father were his strong opinions and the convic­tion he demon­strated and shared with others. He was never one to hide his contempt for some idiotic public figure who took people for granted, or to hold back insight­ful comments about some recent newswor­thy event. For all the formal school­ing he lacked, he had a clear way of express­ing himself and was an aware and well-liked co-worker.

Mom also had opinions about every­thing, but unfor­tu­nately hers tended to side with whoever she’d last heard or seen on televi­sion. She saw multi­ple sides to all issues but found it impos­si­ble to remain consis­tent in her feelings about them. Except when it came to Dad. Whenever he did voice an opinion or express outrage at some fool who’d gone off and done something stupid, Mom would be there to defend that other person or what they’d done. If Johnny said things were one ways, she would argue they were some other. If Johnny felt an official was corrupt or self-serving, Mary had no doubt there was more to the story, and no doubt that official wasn’t that bad after all. Sometimes it seemed she just enjoyed being contrary. Conver­sa­tions had a habit of begin­ning and ending very quickly around my parents.

Besides her magazines, which Mom brought home from various places and left stacked in piles all over the house, she read very little. The only ‘real’ book I remem­ber of hers, besides a couple of Bibles, was a dog-eared copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover which she kept hidden away behind a sliding shelf in the headboard of her bed. For over thirty years, D.H. Lawrence’s classic was banned under obscen­ity laws in England and North America, because of it’s language and vivid depic­tion of sex, which I’m certain was it’s appeal to my mother. This, of course, was what appealed to me as a teenager, although I was surprised when I thumbed through it, how non-graphic and liter­ary the sex scenes were, not nearly as titil­lat­ing as the pictures in the Playboy magazines I would later thumb through at the plant.

The only other books Mom had scattered around the house were a number of Reader’s Digest Condensed books. I couldn’t abide these truncated versions of real books. They offended my sense of what books should contain — every word that an author had intended to be read, not just the ‘right’ ones that some hack editor deemed worthy of seeing. To me, condensed books were as offen­sive as the covers of hit songs by K-Tel artists, or cheap repro­duc­tions of famous paint­ings. They were of no value, certainly not something that should be on public display, let alone read.
Perhaps this lack of books in the home is what started me collect­ing books. I’ve never been a great reader, but I do like books. I like the feel and the look of them, the heft, the odour, and the variety of papers, the bindings, the various shapes and sizes they come in.

Despite my growing library of books, it wasn’t until fewer than ten years ago that I really learned how to read. In 2002, I attended the SFU Writer’s Studio with several emerg­ing writers, most of whom were well read, liter­ate. Many had strong ideas about good writing and good writers. Many of the writers they spoke about I had never heard of and never read, but I began to buy the books and the authors they were recom­mend­ing and discov­ered authors like Joan Didion, Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, John Berger, Jack Kerouac, Anie Dillard, Wright Morris and many more.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t already read and discov­ered several authors before this on my own. I owned (and had read) dozens of novels by writers such as Morde­cai Richler, Robert­son Davies, Timothy Findlay, John Irving, Margaret Atwood, Dosto­evsky, James Joyce, Hermann Hesse, W.P. Kinsella and more. The more I began to focus on the craft of writing, the more I under­stood how diffi­cult and demand­ing the disci­pline of writing really is; how authors strug­gle to make each sentence say when they need it to. I’ve now come to believe that in order to write well, you must first learn how to read well.

1962 Signet Edition (Canada)

Up until then I believed I could already do both. I had been a journal­ist and had written articles for magazines. I prided myself on an exten­sive vocab­u­lary, wrote songs, listened very carefully to lyrics, yet when it came to books, I had never really examined what made one author’s writing stand out from another’s. I had a rudimen­tary under­stand­ing of story and narra­tive but had never closely examined what makes some books soar, while others fall flat. I’ve always known when I was reading good work, but I hadn’t really consid­ered why or what it works. Just as learn­ing to play music had changed how I listened, learn­ing to write has taught me how to read.

I’m still not a voracious reader, but last summer when I moved from Vancou­ver up the coast, I brought along more than seventy-five boxes filled with books, which now surround and comfort me. Bookcases fill the walls and there are still several boxes waiting to be unpacked. I hope to get to them soon, and perhaps I will. No matter how hard you look, nowhere on my shelves or in any of the boxes will you find a Reader’s Digest condensed book. It just wouldn’t be right. But on one shelf, sandwiched between Women in Love and Sons and Lovers you’ll find the complete unexpur­gated authen­tic autho­rized Signet edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that once belonged to my mother. One of these days I’m going to dig it out and read the whole thing from cover to cover.