Cold Shower 27: What should I be reading?

Cold Shower What should I be reading?
Volume I, Article XXVII

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 published articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, I’ve read your book The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, and the thought occurred to me I should be reading more, but what? Any suggestions?

Dr. Fisher replies:

What a wonderful question. With television, the Internet, e-mail, fax machines, cell phones, video games, and VHS and DVD videocassettes of practically everything, we are told the reading of books is passé. Yet traditional publishers produce 60,000 new books every year. In addition, “the small press” and electronically produced books “printed on demand” (POD) account for another 30,000 books annually. This does not include so-called “e-books,” which can be downloaded directly from your computer.

Should you be reading more? You are asking the wrong person. I am never without a book in my hands. I can be standing in line at the post office, or supermarket, or sitting waiting while my wife tries on clothes at the department store, and I am reading. In high school when I was an athlete, I always read on the bus while other guys were shooting the breeze, playing cards, or cutting up. During my professional career, I spent more than a million miles in the air, which I never minded because I always had several books to read. Reading is my passion, and it was quite natural to make the next step to writing.

Your question also implies the desire for a reading list. Mortimer Adler notwithstanding, no one can develop a reading list for you, or suggest how you might find time to read. Reading for scholarship, pleasure, information, escape or to kill time only touches the surface. That surface has a multiple of subsets each unique and individualistic. What I can share is my personal reading habits. My tastes are eclectic.

My mother was a reader preferring historical tomes, parts of which she often read to me. This gave me a taste for the word. The Sisters of St. Francis at St. Patrick’s Grammar School required 18 book reports for both the 7th and 8th grade. It was in that compulsive reading climate that I discovered my passion. Many of the books I then read were on the lives of saints. I discovered their humanness, and that caring sharpened my own.

Strangely, I attended a public high school where reading was less emphasized. Many of my peers didn’t even read what was assigned, but faked it. When I entered the university, and majored in chemistry, I was prevented from becoming a technical nerd by required core courses in the humanities. This re-stimulated my passion for reading. There I discovered James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, John Dos Passos, James Fenimore Cooper, as well as Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare. During my summer vacations during my college years I read at least a 100 books each summer. Among those that still resonate with me are James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan Trilogy, Mazo de la Roche’s Growth of a Man, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, Stendhal’s Red and Black, Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Edna Ferber’s So Big, and John dos Passos’s USA. All novels, they helped me to better understand the adult world and myself.

When I was a boy during WWII, I read The Clinton Herald like the bible, and became a student of op-ed columns, which found me gravitating to other newspapers and syndicated columnists such as Mike Royko, James Reston, and William Raspberry.

Reading habits change. I once read The Saturday Review of Literature cover-to-cover. I now read instead The New York Review, and The London Review for their insightful essays. I’ve found that Garry Wills, Murray Kempton, Gore Vidal, Janet Malcolm, Stephen Jay Gould, William Pfaff, Rosemary Dinnage, Michael Wood, Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, among others, have a taste for the good sentence. They entertain as they enlighten. There is no shortage of good essayists today. Foreign Affairs is another periodical I find enchanting, which introduced me to such writers as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Paul Johnson, Paul Kennedy, Francis Fukuyama and Peter Drucker. They guide me through the labyrinth of international intrigue. On the other hand, I find newspapers disappointing. They have become comic books with subtitles. Provocative pictures and captioned summaries have become common fair without much content or subtext.

I’ve been writing a novel for the past twelve years, which finds me reading several popular authors in this genre to get a sense of their magic. I’ve encountered, to my surprise, some very good writing. My tendency is to identify with authors rather than books. Once I discover a writer I like I read all their works I can find. This is true of nonfiction as well as fiction. A partial list of such authors is Erich Fromm, Eric Hoffer, Rollo May, Krishnamurti, Khalil Gibran, John Le Carre, Isaiah Berlin, Carl Sandbug, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Dreiser, Fulton J. Sheen, Will Durant, Christopher Lasch, Joseph Campbell, J. P. Donleavy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dame Sackville West, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill, P. D. James, Martha Grimes, Elizabeth George, Jonathan Harrington, Bill Granger, David Wiltse, James Joyce, and so on. These authors teased away the veil of obfuscation and put me in touch with myself.

The New York Review introduced me to Isaiah Berlin and television to Joseph Campbell. Berlin’s history of ideas, and Campbell’s cultural mythology have changed my perspective. Reading is personal. No one’s needs are identical to another person’s. Read where your heart leads you, and it will be right and good and wonderful.

Copyright (2002). Look for Dr. Fisher’s “wake-up call” book due out in 2005: Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent man?