To all the books I’ve loved before

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

After Ötzi the Iceman was discovered frozen in the Eastern Italian Alps, scientists examined the contents of his stomach to learn what types of foods he ate 5,300 years ago. They found that Ötzi had chowed down on muscle fibers and fat tissues from various animals just before dying, along with some einkorn wheat and other plant matter as a side dish.

I’ll bet those same scientists wished they could do the same with Ötzi’s brain and discover what this man thought about, what made him tick and, perhaps, what he dreamed about those millennia ago.

If my brain were preserved in a jar and future scientists crammed anodes into the matter to discover what made me me, I’ll bet more than anything, they’d find a swirling sea of information gathered from thousands of books I’ve read over the years. More than any other medium, books are responsible for informing my character, which isn’t uncommon for writers. We are sponges, and oftentimes some of what we’ve gathered leaks out into what we write.

If these future scientists really dug in, they’d find some of the first bibliographic entries were from the National Geographic magazines and Encyclopedia Britannica, which I read cover-to-cover as a child. It was this early curiosity that set the foundation for a lifetime of interest in learning new things.

They’d also find some of my first “adult” novels, which I picked off my parents’ bookshelves and read one by one, though I didn’t understand many of the concepts until later. These include books like Giant by Edna Ferber and The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, which helped me begin to understand the magical interplay between characters in a novel.

These early years were also filled with page after page of Bill Watterson’s famed comic Calvin and Hobbes, as well as Gary Larson’s The Far Side, both of which I purchased book collections of and read often.

There were my horror years when all I wanted to read were Stephen King novels like The Stand, The Shining and others, as well as works by Thomas Harris such as Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. 

There were the picaresque years, when I couldn’t get enough of those rough, yet appealing heroes discovering the world. Titles include Don Quixote, On the Road, The Adventures of Augie March and many of Mark Twain’s works.

I was introduced to the art of gonzo after discovering Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, then soon fell into a pit of reading everything he wrote from behind those strange aviator lenses, as well as others of the time period including works by Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs.

My love of place and story can be traced back to the many books of John Steinbeck, who told such round, impactful stories filled with symbolic characters who jumped off the page.

The science fiction portal to my soul was satisfied with Philip K. Dick’s entire collection, as well as Jules Verne novels. The day I first opened J.R.R. Tolkien was an important one.

The anti-authoritarian, fiercely independent side of me was born after reading George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and others.

I became enamored with the sea after reading dozens of nautical novels, such as Moby Dick, the Horatio Hornblower series, The Sea Wolf  by Jack London, Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr., Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum and so many more.

The analytical part of my brain was activated when I started reading old noir detective novels by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, later augmented by more modern entries by Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly and Elmore Leonard.

I discovered humor was integral to happiness after reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, among others.

Each of these stories entered into the logbook of my brain over the years has added a certain flavor to the soup. I have no regrets. These books are former, current and future lovers all wrapped into one, always ready for me to bring them off the shelf for another tryst.

To all the books I’ve loved before: thank you. Life wouldn’t be the same without you.