The Literary Blog Hop is a blogging activity hosted by the amazing girls of The Blue Bookcase.This week's theme is:
What other outside influences affect your reading experience? Do you think these influences enhance or detract from the experience?
I do. I do have outside influenced that kind of steered my experience with books. It kind of goes a long way, so please bear with me. I come from a very special place. A small mining town in the North East Quebec, where I lived for nineteen years before moving to Montreal. Going to school there was not the easiest thing. Times changed and I'm sure the place changed too since then, but here's how it worked for little boys back then. If you had the bad luck to run trouble with older boys, which happened to me all the time, you were on your own. The last thing you wanted to do was to get adults involved in. If you did, the kid would be punished, told not to mess with you again and unleashed in the schoolyard with you again. Twice as angry. And it doesn't get better in high school. I was this tall, scrawny kid who had to live with those angry, redneck kids for many years. So I learned to take care of myself and developed this weird fascination with strength, power, manliness, all those things you know?
So I got into martial arts.
And it totally steered the way I read and think about books. Martial arts shapes your body, but it also shapes your mind. A good martial artist doesn't like when it's easy. Challenge is something he has to welcome in order to get sharper. Books were a field of activity where I could get my mind at work and draw knowledge, experience, wisdom and wits from. Like David Foster Wallace once said, reading a good book is having a discussion in between consciousnesses with your favorite writers. You measure up your experiences and your life against one that has been built from the writer's own experiences. It helps to cope with the impossibility of true empathy and fortifies the inner self. At least, that's how I see it.
So you know? That's why I don't feel compelled to read the likes of James Patterson and Dan Brown, unless it's to talk shit about them better. I don't see the point if it's not going to shock me, weird me out or do something I have never seen before. That's why I try so many authors that have been "canonized" and try to find the aesthetic wonder (let's say Hemingway) or the institutional fallacy of their reputation (maybe not Joyce, but Finnegan's Wake for sure). I read like I'm gearing up for a fight. It's the way I like to do things. It keeps me sharp and keen. It's a short post this week because there's no way of exposing this kind of background without pulling out the violins, which I don't want to do. If it wasn't of those angry redneck kids, I wouldn't be writing today. Even less be who I am. So all those years of pure fear were very character forming in the end.