Today I was listening to a podcast of my favourite late night radio show, “Late Night Live”. You have absolutely no idea how overjoyed I was to discover that on getting an Ipod last year, I was able to go online and download LNL. Since living abroad, I hadn’t listened to the program in a good 6 years and it was great to hear the dulcid tones of that lefty satirist Phillip Adams, and his amazing array of guests who talk about literally anything from ’sovereign wealth funds’ to ‘who the political players are in Tonga.’
Now you may think that all sounds terribly boring and so highbrow that it would be better than valium, but it is amazingly interesting, and I can count on one hand the amount of times that I have thought, “Nah, this interview’s boring” or “Not downloading that show. Not at all interested.”
Well, I listened to a gem today, which has inspired this post. Phillip was having one of his ‘indulgent’ shows, where he got to talk about one of his passions for the hour, and on this particular day it was books. His guests were Harold Bloom, a New York literary critic, and Bob Car, former Premier (Head of Government) of the state of New South Wales, Australia. Carr has just written a new book called My Reading Life and Bloom has written way too many to mention.
To hear these three men sit for an hour and natter about literary works was amazing. As a child I was a book worm, but as soon as I hit secondary school, that passion for books left, and is only just starting to come back now. These three men adore books, and, in the case of Bloom, have devoured whole libraries of books, and can wax lyrical about any author, or genre of writing. To say I felt inadequate was an understatement.
It made me think though how important books are in our lives. Even if we only read, or had books read to us as a child, we all must have our favourites. My favourite childhood book was ‘Little Black Sambo’, which is now banned in most countries, and is the epitome of racism. But as a child, that never occurred to me. It was exotic, and I just thought it was funny that the tiger ran and ran around the tree until he turned into Ghi (clarified butter). Little Black Sambo then took the Ghi home to his mother and she made pancakes. Fabulous!
Adams, Carr and Bloom all believe that books should be so much part of us that they “become part of our DNA”, as Bob Carr so eloquently put it. How many books have we come across in our lives that have are so part of us or our beliefs? Name the books you couldn’t put down once you started reading them. No matter if we are the lightest or the heaviest of readers, there must be at least one book that has touched us, made us angry, made us think, made us cry, struck us dumb.
Students notoriously hate having to read books as set texts for study. I have always said to students that one day they may find the author of their dreams. I did. And it was the most unlikely of authors, too. His name was Chaim Potok, a Jewish New Yorker who wrote at least six works of fiction about the experiences of the Jewish life and wrote with such a richness that I was hooked and read every book he ever wrote. Just recently I looked on the web to find out what he is writing now, and found that he had passed away in 2002. It was like I had lost a long lost friend. Potok’s works have stayed with me forever, and one of them, ‘My Name is Asher Lev’ is still one of the most stunning pieces of fiction I have read, ever. Its complex messages, imagery, and descriptive language still live with me, and after hearing these three literary sages all agree that re-reading an old book again and again as one gets older allows you to see it through different eyes, has made me want to get my hands back onto ‘Asher Lev’ and immerse myself in the riches of that Hasidic world of New York past.
So, I hope this inspires you to get out a book and start to read, or dust off an oldie, and take a little journey down the road of rediscovery. Your DNA may never be the same.
“The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.” ~James Bryce
Enjoy your day.
