Well, we’re almost at the end of Literacy Month, but the fun’s just beginning.
On Saturday, Sunshine Coast Literacy Coalition volunteers will be performing “random acts of reading” for the benefit of passengers on BC Ferries’ Langdale run. It’s called “Word on the Water” and it’s almost worth taking the trip just to be read to.
For the young ones, Gibsons councillor Charlene SanJenko will be reading children’s stories on Monday at Gibsons Elementary School and on Wednesday, Sechelt Mayor Bruce Milne will do the honours at the Sechelt Learning Centre.
Families with newborns, meanwhile, will have a children’s book delivered to their homes under the “Books for Babies” program.
Literacy needs all the promotion it can get, and books in particular need as much exposure as they can be given. Reading is a lifelong journey. As a young man, I gravitated toward 19th century authors as an antidote to the vulgar mass culture of the 1970s. Inspired by Herman Melville and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, I joined the navy so I could go to sea. In boot camp in Cornwallis, I was ridiculed for reading Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady.
Later I got hooked on Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton detective who in many ways created modern crime fiction, at least the North American variety, modeling the style on his case reports. After Hammett came James M. Cain, who pioneered the “first-person-criminal” narrative in books like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Both Hammett and Cain inspired a generation of “hard-boiled” crime fiction writers, including Ross Macdonald, who grew up in Canada and wrote the Lew Archer series of mystery novels.
Although I got a lot of pleasure out of reading fiction and poetry, I have to admit I regret not having spent more time with non-fiction. These days I’m still trying to catch up on essential history. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, laid bare some hard truths about the Soviet Union, as did the Estonian writer Jüri Lina in his Soviet history, Under the Sign of the Scorpion.
And of course, there’s always Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, if you want to know what the great chiefs said.
Understanding the present means understanding the past. Books are really the only way.
