Magic

You both like reading. Please, don’t stop. The world is fast—Jesus, it moves fast, and I feel it myself. There’s an anxiety in just sitting, breathing and telling yourself to slow down. I went to see Kevin Costner’s Horizon, and I could feel it. I’m so used to grabbing my phone from my pocket every ten seconds that sitting in a theater by myself, in the dark, with no phone and no distractions was hard. I hated it, because it never used to be hard.

But reading slows the world down. It lets you take in information at your own pace. And when you find a book that completely pulls you out of your own reality—well, you’ve just discovered magic.

As you go through the public school system, you’ll probably lose some of your love for reading. If it’s anything like when I was growing up, you’ll be force-fed old classics. You’ll be made to dissect themes, motifs, antagonists, protagonists—all of that—and it will almost certainly take some of the joy out of reading. You might even start thinking there aren’t any books beyond the so-called classics. I know I was assigned Jane Eyre so many times that I became convinced every book was written the same way.

But my parents were both avid readers, and they assured me there was nothing quite like a good book. They gave me some great places to start. So, I’ll do the same for you.

First, I need to tell you how reading saved me during a time when my mind was getting blacker and blacker. We were broke, and COVID was making it nearly impossible to find another job. I’d made some bad choices, and I was sinking into a depression unlike anything I’d ever experienced. (I’ll get to that later on.)

Reading brought me back to the land of the living. There was a used bookstore on St. Peter Street where books were either $1 or $2. I found some of the greatest books I’ve ever read there—magic for $1. (You can also visit your local library, where they rent out magic for free.)

Here are some of your old man’s favorites (in no particular order):

Stephen King – The Stand

Philip Roth – American Pastoral

Tim O’Brien – The Things They Carried

Dennis Lehane – The Given Day

Frank Herbert – Dune

John Steinbeck – East of Eden

Ernest Hemingway – For Whom the Bell Tolls

I hope you both keep reading so that one day, you can share your favorites with me.

It’s magic, I tell you. Magic.