Dive into a good book this Christmas. It will be worth it. Photo: File.
My last column of 2024 is a good time to reflect on the year almost gone.
But in this time of goodwill, I don’t want to talk about the depressing state of politics here and elsewhere, or spend 500 words complaining about some of the exasperating things people get up to or face.
No, this is about what has made a difference to me in these past 12 months.
If there is one thing I am grateful for this year, it’s rediscovering the joy of reading.
This may sound odd given I spend my days running my eye over news reports, media releases and documents.
For a long time the sheer weight of words consumed in my work forbade me from picking up a book later, opting to splash around in the stream of quality TV at our fingertips these days.
But Netflix did many of us a favour putting the kybosh on password sharing.
And when I say reading, I don’t mean scanning text on a screen, but absorbing the printed page turned by hand.
(Studies show we remember and comprehend better when reading print versus the screen.)
It took a while. Indeed, one of my first attempts to return to delving into print was an abject failure, my brain so stumped by the novel’s structure and pace that I put it down again and again until it found the shelf.
The irony is that this work I spurned turned into one I eventually couldn’t put down and its author a writer I am now evangelical about.
If there is one author to discover over the summer, please try Amor Towles.
The book Gentleman in Moscow (ignore the series on Paramount), recommended by a son, languished on the shelf until my partner picked it up and started raving about it, eventually reading passages to me over breakfast.
It tells the tale of a Russian aristocrat under permanent house arrest in a top Moscow hotel where he makes a new life despite the restrictions and diminishment of his position.
There is a caravan of beautifully drawn characters and episodes over the decades of Bolshevik rule until the 1950s, set against the background of revolution, demoralising social levelling, purges, war and Cold War intrigue.
It is one of the most sophisticated and wittiest books I have ever read, almost in spite of the horror alluded to around them.
Many’s the time I re-read paragraphs simply for the beauty of its language.
But I had to persevere at first, almost re-educate myself in how to read. For my brain to slow down, to fully take in the words, stay in the moment and resist skipping ahead, so the magic of imagination could begin forming the world being described to me.
The joy came when that world became tangible enough for me to inhabit it – and there I am having dinner with the count – and to fall in love with the characters.
It led me to other books such as Australian author Inga Simpson’s rural fable Mr Wigg and her near-future apocalyptic thriller, so different but connected by her fabulous nature writing.
Then Mr Towles called me back with his first novel Rules of Civility set in a 1930s New York filled with painfully human characters, and the more recent The Lincoln Highway, a 50s coming of age road story that starts in the Midwest and ends in New York, has echos of Homer, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie and is laced with classical references.
In a world of fast food, fast TV, and fast information, these works have reminded me of the power of the story and the vitalness of imagination.
So thank you Mr Towles.
In this slow time of the year, I hope you can take advantage of it to pick up a good book and lose yourself in it for a while.
God bless, and bring on the new year.
Original Article published by Ian Bushnell on Riotact.
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