That's one of the things I like about books, fiction and non-fiction: the often twisted, offset, or slanted ways they enter and illuminate your life, or how they may do so. Of course, there are plenty of books I turn to that offer much more straightforward echoing and modeling: Homer's Odyssey, Fowles' Daniel Martin, Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Hiaasen's Basket Case, Martin Cruz Smith's Havana Bay. And yet you'd probably need a map or a strong dose of intuition to see the "obvious" connections in the works I just mentioned. The richest connections are often more associational and emotional than linear and logical. Certainly, I've found that I tend to avoid books about middle-aged college English instructors, for I find those stories far less illuminating than most bystanders would imagine.
(A good book offers characters and a story, perhaps multiple stories; a good book also offers a mirror --or mirrors-- to see oneself more clearly. Frankly, a good reader looks around, looks beyond, and looks within.)
Reading was probably my "first drug" too.
Here's that passage from William Gibson's fairly recent novel:
Take your medicine. Clean your teeth. Pack for Paris.
When had he last been in Paris? It felt as though he never had. Someone else had been, in his early twenties. That mysterious previous iteration his therapist in Basel had been so relentlessly interested in. A younger, hypothetical self. Before things started to go not so well, then worse, then much worse, though by then he'd arranged to be absent much of the time. As much of the time as possible.
"Quit staring," he said to the dressmaker's dummy as he stepped into his room. "I wish I had a book." It had been quite a while since he'd found anything to read for pleasure. Nothing since the start of his recovery, really. There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, rearranged daily by the housekeepers, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative.
He'd look for a book in Paris.
Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.
--from pages 92-93 of William Gibson's Zero History, published in 2010 By G.P. Putnam's Sons in New York City.
P.S. Gibson is an old favorite, a writer to whom I return year after year, though a full year may pass without my picking up one of his novels or stories. And yet when I do, I'm always happy I did. I am often mesmerized how he moves within and from phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and so forth. Connections between writers and readers may differ from book to book, and within a single book, those connections may rely on character, conflict, plotting, narrative strategies, or even simple phrasing. Each time I pick up Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, I probably connect with a different aspect and find a different point of connection and enjoyment.
P.P.S. Check out Chapter 23: Meredith of Zero History if you want a quick sense of Gibson's deft touch with supporting characters as well as his utter command of the less obvious but nevertheless true springs of life. Note Meredith's back-story on pages 117-119, especially, for one example of the way a life can flow unpredictably and yet still make absolute sense.
Then, note how "easily" Gibson tells her story; there are lessons in narrative craft on every page.
Byron claimed that "easy reading" is not the result of "easy writing," but the author's job is to make it seem so. I know Gibson knows his Byron because I asked him in an eight-minute conversation back in the mid-1990's and because in The Difference Engine (by Gibson and Bruce Sterling), Gibson revises the dead lord's fate, defying history to have Byron survive fever and the Greek Revolution to become prime minister of England . . . . Byron's daughter Ada helped create the "Difference Engine," after all, historically and in that novel.
Okay, I'll quit revising and adding to this entry now.
Check out Zero History; do yourself that favor.
