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Reading Early

While incomparably less well-read than someone like J.G. Ballard, I can still relate to his regret of having read the best books of his life before twenty. Around my mid-twenties, I started to struggle a great deal with finding books that held my interest and I could recall the details of. I was reading plenty but in a haphazard sort of way, trying to find the thing that I could latch on to. I was longing to find my few favorite authors that I would love and read forever - like finding a family that is yours. That never came to pass. 

..I now regret that so much of my reading took place during my late adolescence, long before I had any adult experience of the world, long before I had fallen in love, learned to understand my parents, earned my own living and had time to reflect on the world’s ways. It may be that my intense adolescent reading actually handicapped me in the process of growing up — in all senses my own children and their contemporaries strike me as more mature, reflective and more open to the possibilities of their own talents than I was at their age. I seriously wonder what Kafka and Dostoyevsky, Sartre and Camus could have meant to me. That same handicap I see borne today by those people who spend their university years reading English literature — scarcely a degree subject at all and about as rigorous a discipline as music criticism — before gaining the experience to make sense of the exquisite moral dilemmas that their tutors are so devoted to teasing out.

Like Ballard, I was trying hard (and rather unsuccessfully) to get J into reading like I did. She reads more now and gets a lot more value from it than I was able to by her age. She is coming to great writing with some life experience of her own that I simply did not have when I read those books. I am not sure all that reading was wasted on me - its shaped my world view and how I process things in my personal and professional life. If I have been leading a sensible life in balance, it could be argued the reading has helped make that possible.

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