At the outset of what I would describe as my reading life, which began in earnest at the age of nine, I discovered Louis L’Amour. He wasn’t the first writer I would very nearly wholly consume, but he remains what I might describe as my first true guide.
As I consider it, some of my earliest and clearest memories are of books. There are a series of images seared in my mind in which I am holding a book in my hands, of putting my nose into its pages because I like the way it smells; of turning its pages and narrating into the shape of words I hadn’t quite learned how to read. Sure, many of those early books had pictures, but I was never too much concerned with those—it was the structure of the sentences just underneath them that held my curiosity—a form of magic and alchemy I’m still deciphering and pursuing all these many years later and with every new book I read.
Reading didn’t naturally come to me at first. In fact, I was slow to pick it up in the classroom. I was well aware of certain girls who could read the Dick and Jane books without the aid of Mrs. Hogoboom in Kindergarten at Lincoln Elementary School. I wasn’t jealous of those girls, but their independent literacy frustrated me because I had a bigger need to know what the books in my room back home had to tell me and I wasn’t going to get to discover any of it for myself until I could adequately read on my own. Sure, my parents read to me, but I wanted to know for myself how to navigate those pages and speak what the printed ink wanted my mouth to say; my mind and heart to understand. I resolved to work harder to get it right. It was a genuine and pure desire—the first, I think, I can attest to ever truly having of and for myself. With a little persistence I succeeded and soon enough flourished as a young reader—I became one of the best in the first grade and onward from there. Much like a leggy young colt finally breaking out of the pen to run at his own pace over all that wild terrain against the wind and horizon, my ability to finally read was the escape. Once out, I never returned to the old pen.
I must have come trailing some old glory because in addition to reading I had a sense for the Old West. I loved watching John Wayne Westerns with my Dad. Wayne’s West was my land too. I was born in Utah, grew up and lived in the Mountain West of that State and Idaho and Colorado too. Even now, when I watch John Wayne saunter across the lens of John Ford’s PanaVision, against the backdrop of Monument Valley, I feel like I am home. It’s a bone-deep recognition. But as grand as film was and remains, it wasn’t until I started reading Louis L’Amour at the age of nine that something more authentic clicked in my heart. I sensed a complete praxis of image and essence with language in a space that embodied the heritage that formed me into this mortal world. L’Amour put into my mouth the taste of the beans and tobacco, the scent of the horse and the kick of the rifle, the pursuit of the frontier and the hope of an America I was going to take a part in bringing to its fullest and best self. More than all of this, though was the mentoring, way down beneath the words that told me, that I too, was a writer of the American West—that one day I’d write a few of my own books too. And this is happening…
For now though I want to focus on one simple and profound habit that I learned to keep and honor from Mr. Louis L’Amour himself. At the back of his memoir Education of a Wandering Man he offered me something that changed my life. He provided a series of reading lists he kept from the 1930s during his hobo years, traveling about boxing and doing whatever work came his way until he started writing stories of his own. By the time I completed reading his memoir and came upon that particular section (a complete and serendipitous moment of surprise to me) I had very nearly read some fifty of his books (I would eventually read them all) but nothing meant more to me than to see the lists he kept during those years of the writers and titles he’d read. Sometimes in life we discover something, usually small in the worldly sense, that offers a truth so profound that to possess it means only to somehow embody and personify it. I did just that from that moment on. To have been shown, by a writer I had so completely loved how much he loved what he read and to be inspired to keep a list of my own for myself, just as he had done for himself, was as prized a possession as any I have ever been given. That very afternoon I sat down and began to keep a list of what I had read in 1989 and in the years to come I have continued to do so. At the beginning of each year I look forward to writing the new year at the top of a page knowing that I have the year in front of me to fill it with the names of books and their writers I will get to know—through the very sentences they crafted and secretly, I believe, only for me to read.
Sometimes I wonder, why I keep the list—does it matter that I have it? Not really. Will anyone want to know what is on the list I’ve kept of all the things I’ve read? Probably not. But that is beside the point. To read is to roam. To read is to taste the sweet and the bitter of life with greater sense of the senses themselves. To list the books I’ve read is to remind myself every time I step out the front door, that I’ve filled my heart and my head with language to meet and match the grandeur of the experience that will be mine as I navigate in and through the world I step out into.
Reading isn’t for everybody, but I wish that it was. I am not alone in suggesting that this world would be far less maddening if more people simply decided to read. But I also realize that to read requires a form of will that is nurtured and it takes time. I don’t read to be important, I don’t read to be smart, I don’t read to be better than anyone. I read because reading reminds me of who I am – I am a writer (yes, somehow I knew this even at an early age and long before I was really a reader—I can’t explain it). I too am a storyteller. I am a chronicler of my time and the small insignificant space I take up along the endless line of this moment in this world’s history. I have taken up the call to contribute a little bit of my own verse as an echo of my time. And in order to more fully do this in the manner and hope of my literary desires is to first be a good enough reader to test the measure of my voice against and amongst the chorus of voices I’ve spent a lifetime getting to know, getting to sing in the shape of my mouth—that their words have been spoken in my voice and maybe, one day, my words will be spoken in yours and those of our children on down the infinite and expansive line of this world and its veiled grey curtain. In the end, what I read, what I write is not of any great import other than to suggest that it marked my passage through this time before I end up in the cosmos where the stars keep shining and the great mystery of the great divide promises to remain a magnificent mystery forevermore.
So, my dear reader, do yourself a favor. If you are not already doing so, begin keeping a list of everything you have completed reading. And remember, a list is only as exciting and curious as the promise of what you get to add to it after you’ve read that next book. The well is deep, it is pure and cold and delicious! Drink from it and record every cup you’ve swallowed. I promise you, your life will be richer and happier for having done so.
…it doesn’t matter, but deep down you’ll know otherwise once you start doing it…
You will live a meaningful life.
RCS
16 February, 2022