Seven Things About Spencer as a Reader

1. Currently, I don't have any traditional library cards. I haven't had any, nor have I wanted any, for some years now; not since one library tried to charge me something like a $15.00 fee (I forget the exact amount, but it was in the 12 to 20 dollar range) for a DVD that was returned only a couple of days late. I circular-filed my card rather than pay the fine! However, I have something much better than any traditional library card. I have a computer with an ISP connection (that works most days) via which I can access the largest library in the known universe, otherwise known as "The Internet." Indeed, I am a person who reads extensively and constantly, but not usually by turning pages in physical "books" anymore. Most of what I read nowadays is found on the Internet where the entire contents of many thousands of books can be found, and where the online editions of many thousands of newspapers and magazines reside.

2. Don't misunderstand. I have not abandoned books entirely. In fact, I still buy physical books frequently. Mostly, I buy them online and have them shipped to me. It's just that I now read them at a much slower rate of consumption (i.e., the number of books read per year) than I once did. During the dozen years from about the age of 12 through age 23, I easily read a couple of thousand books; and, for some odd reason, quite early on in that span of time, I had figured out that if a person was going to spend innumerable hours reading books, it made much more sense to read the highest quality books that one was capable of reading. Thus, my list of "titles read" during those years includes many more examples from among "the classic books of world literature" than it does from other areas. Not to say that I haven't read my share of "popular fiction." I've read virtually all of the novels and short stories by Ian Fleming and Sir Arthur Conon Doyle; much of the output from the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald; and a fair bit of John Le Carré and Len Deighton.

3. So, outside of the authors cited just above, who actually ARE my "personal favorite" authors? Here is a rough list in alphabetical order:
Kingsley Amis
Jane Austen
John Barth
L. Frank Baum
Saul Bellow
Charles Bukowski
Anthony Burgess
William S. Burroughs
Albert Camus
Lewis Carroll
Miguel de Cervantes
E.L. Doctorow
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Alexandre Dumas
Lawrence Durrell
F. Scott Fitzgerald
John Fowles
Carlos Fuentes
Gabriel García Márquez
William Goldman
Kenneth Grahame
Graham Greene
Joseph Heller
Ernest Hemingway
Victor Hugo
James Joyce
Ken Kesey
Rudyard Kipling
Milan Kundera
D.H. Lawrence
Jeremy Leven
Malcolm Lowry
Norman Mailer
Thomas Mann
W. Somerset Maugham
Herman Melville
Henry Miller
Iris Murdoch
Vladmir Nabokov
George Orwell
Robert Pirsig
Anthony Powell
Marcel Proust
Thomas Pynchon
François Rabelais
J.D. Salinger
Sir Walter Scott
John Steinbeck
Robert Louis Stevenson
Jonathan Swift
Hunter S. Thompson
Henry David Thoreau
J.R.R. Tolkien
Mark Twain
John Updike
Jules Verne
Gore Vidal
Kurt Vonnegut
Alan W. Watts
H. G. Wells
Irvine Welsh
Oscar Wilde
P. G. Wodehouse
Tom Wolfe

4. I have read all of the "books" of the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Bible several times in various different translations. What do I think of it? It's an interesting anthology of a specific historical culture's literature, written in a number of different styles, genres, and levels of quality; and it's written with various assorted purposes and intents in mind. Is it an unified whole to be "believed in" by its readers? No, and certainly no more than are the Norton (or Oxford) anthologies of British or American Literatures, books to be "believe in" and "followed." And I would say the same thing about all of the "sacred books" of all of the other religions of the world, also.

5. What do I consider to be THE single most important "book" that any reader should attempt to master in his life? That would be one of two books: Either the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, or (for the truly ambitious) the complete multi-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary. If a reader does not understand what all of the words mean, then he or she can read books until doomsday and never really get as much out of many of them as the authors of those books put into them!

6. I read more slowly than many people I know, both in terms of my innate capacity to "take in" sentences and paragraphs at a speed that is too much above that of the pace of normal speech, and also in terms of my "style" of reading where I will frequently reread some sentence or paragraph or page numerous times (either to fully grasp it, or to fully appreciate and enjoy it) before leaving it and pressing on to the next sentence or paragraph or page. So, this means I find reading (at least when reading anything that's much above the level of the average article in-- oh, let's say-- Slate Magazine, or The New Republic, or the New Yorker Magazine; or anything that's much beyond their lengths) to be something of an effort. Thus, when choosing such higher level (or longer) things to read, I try to stick with only the very BEST of what has been written, and I often rely, in advance, on multiple reviews of a given book to indicate to me if it is really worth the effort. The two big up-sides of this, are (1) that I seldom ever end up even beginning any books that I ultimately find to be so boring or so poorly written that I want to abandon them; and (2) that I tend to remember for years, and in some detail, quite a bit of what I read.

7. I probably own in the neighborhood of 5,000 (plus) books that range in production quality from old used paperbacks, or hardback books I bought for 25 cents each at Library sales, all the way up to some relatively expensive leather-bound editions. My collection of books is probably split roughly 50/50 between paperbacks (both the mass market and the trade size) and standard edition hardbacks. And in certain cases-- especially with a small number of top favorite books, or with a few books that I have tended to repeatedly give away to others-- I will own multiple copies of those titles. Since most of my books are currently kept in boxes, in storage, due to the circumstances of my travels and present living conditions, I am hoping to eventually live in a home with an extensive "floor to ceiling" library room of built-in shelving similar to those one sees in various older movies, back in the days when people actually owned books and sometimes even read them! Dream on, eh?