For the Love of Reading

A good book is a gateway to happiness and better writing

“Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.” ~ Arnold Lobel

I’ve been asked on more than one occasion which author is my most favorite or which author made me want to be a writer.

It is not an easy question to answer.

I have read so many books over the years; I have forgotten most of them. A few do stand out, though, that had made an impression on me when I read them. But if I’m to attempt an answer, the result would always be the same as below:

Everyone I have ever read who showed me the beauty and magic of words and imaginary worlds.

I need to explain.

There is no one book or author that prompted me to write what I write, nor is there any one author I would exalt above others. I’ve always had an affinity for fantasy and its various sub-genres. But I can say the same of other genres, too, including literary fiction. So my inspiration, generally and for future projects, will always include the following authors: Robert E. Howard; Edgar Rice Burroughs; David Gemmell; Bernard Cornwell; Robert B. Parker; AJ Quinnell; Hammond Innes; Desmond Bagley; Louis L’Amour; Ernest Hemingway; Neil Gaiman; Leigh Brackett; Robert Harris; Morris West; Anne Rice; Stephen Lawhead; David Eddings; Ken Follett; Nelson DeMille; JRR Tolkien, and Tim Willocks, and a lot of others whose names I don’t recall at the moment.

Amok by George Fox, for instance, is a book that had a tremendous impact on me in my late teens, possibly early twenties. I remember how engrossed I was in that story about a giant Japanese soldier left behind on a small Philippines island, ordered to delay the enemy advance for as long as possible, which he did for over three decades, using a razor-edged Samurai blade, despite the war being over. Only, no one had told the soldier.

This is not and never will be a closed list. All of these folks make me want to write. At the moment, I’m a Gaiman fan. I also love Mark Lawrence’s work and Bernard Cornwell’s Warrior Chronicles. I’m addicted to David Gemmell’s heroic fantasy stories. You cannot pinpoint only one writer or book. All of them influenced me and shaped me somehow.

Some I have read multiple times, some only once, others I never even finished. As you go through life and grow older, you go through different stages, experience emotions that are ever-evolving, and the books are there. Each one befitting whatever mood you are in, whatever level of maturity you’ve attained. The same story can impact you differently the next year, or it can call back emotions you’ve long forgotten.

“Reading is an act of civilization; it’s one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.” ~Ben Okri

This is what I like about reading. It’s like watching a movie inside your mind but finely attuned to your psyche. Each one of us views life through a very particular lens, and the same lens influences our reading experience. We may like the same writers but for different reasons.

But then you get those writers who somehow evoke the same or similar emotion in everyone, and that is a rare and wonderful talent. Those are the authors I read more than once. Authors like Gaiman, Robert E. Howard, A.J. Quinnell, Robert B. Parker, Louis L’Amour… See what I mean? It just doesn’t stop.

For the sake of nostalgia and maybe also sentimental reasons, I’d like to focus on A.J. Quinnell for this piece. It is a shame that not more people are aware of him and his work. His real name was Philip Nicholson. He wrote A Man on Fire, twice now adapted to film. The second attempt with Denzel Washington was the more successful one and closer to the book in terms of dialogue. Unfortunately, Quinnell is no longer with us, but I loved his stories.

Love his stories.

He wrote 14 novels, of which five were Creasy books. Sadly most of his books are out of print, but you can get some as ebooks on Amazon. I have only two physical copies — The Mahdi and In the Name of the Father — and neither is Creasy novels.

Did you know that, like his protagonist, the ex-French Foreign legionnaire Creasy, Quinnell lived on the Mediterranean Island of Gozo? And like Creasy, Quinnell’s background too is somewhat steeped in mystery.

Creasy is a great character. I think what drew me to him originally was his calm efficiency. His stoic, no-nonsense approach to culling bad guys. The way he tackled a problem was methodical and lethal. Creasy was a closed book to the world, and maybe because I’m not like that and will never be, it drew me in.

Here is an excerpt from the second Creasy novel, The Perfect Kill, in which Creasy has to identify his wife and daughter’s bodies. It illustrates my point about his character:

He was not like the others. The doctor in the makeshift mortuary noticed that immediately. As he looked down at the two bodies the man’s face showed no expression. No grief. No tears. He looked at the girl of four whose body was totally unmarked. She lay on the table as though asleep. Even her long dark hair had been combed. The man’s passive face shifted to the body of the woman. The sheet was drawn up to her neck. The man reached down and pulled the sheet back. The body was naked and terribly mangled.

The doctor murmured, ‘It must have been very quick, sir, a matter of seconds only.’

Later the doctor was to wonder why he had called the man ‘sir’. He was not in the habit of doing so. A uniformed policeman came forward, with a pad in his hand. He looked down at the woman’s body then he looked away. He handed the pad and a pen to the man, and said, ‘Would you mind, sir?’

The man signed his name on the pad, nodded at the doctor and the policeman, and walked out past the long rows of other bodies. The doctor and policeman watched him go. He was a tall, bulky man, with cropped, grey hair. He had a curious walk; with the outside of his feet making first contact with the ground. Both men would always remember his face. Eyes, seemingly without interest, set deep and wide into a square face. Heavy lidded and narrow, as if to avoid cigarette smoke, even though he was not smoking. He had a vertical scar over his right eye, and another, deep and wide, from his right cheekbone to his chin, but the doctor knew that they were old scars. As he went through the door, the policeman said, ‘He didn’t show much.’

`No,’ the doctor corrected him. He showed nothing, absolutely nothing.’

He pulled the sheet up over the woman’s broken body.

I want more people to read A.J. Quinnell’s books. In a world where politics are as fragile as the egos that drive them, you need a hero who cuts through the bull and does the job, silently and efficiently. You need Creasy.

If you want a free taste of Quinnell’s voice, here is a short story by him called Gladiator. (The story is in Adobe .pdf format. If you enjoy the story, please consider donating to the Vhutshilo Mountain School charity, which Quinnell used to support when he was alive.)

I discovered Quinnell many years ago. My dad introduced me to his books. Looking back, I have my dad to thank for my literary heroes because it allowed me to visit many worlds and live many lives. It allowed me to escape reality when the outside world became too heavy or when loss and tragedy threatened to consume me whole.

I’ll leave you with this choice quote:

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” ~ Mortimer J. Adler