Stepping Out and Reaching Further in 2024

I read 12 Books in 2023, I'll be focusing more on writing in 2024.

Photo by Michal Vrba on Unsplash

As reported, President Thomas Jefferson in a letter to his grandson’s tutor, Thomas Mann Randolph, gave instructions about his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s education.

I would therefore put the books into his hands, and let him read at his pleasure, without regarding whether they are childish or manly, English, Latin, or Greek, verse or prose, history, ethics, physics, or anything else. For as he reads so will he write. And if he be a boy of genius, he will write well. If he be not, he will never write well, whatever be the pains taken with him.

As if etched in time and never to be forgotten, another American president in another century reechoed a similar message to his son. As reported, American President John F. Kennedy wrote,

As you grow older you will find that the things you really want to learn can’t be taught in school but you will have to teach yourself. You are lucky because you have many books and with them you can teach yourself anything.

The reason I am in Washington working for you and the country is because I learned from books. For as he reads so will he write.

So I hope you will keep reading more and more and remember that every new book teaches you something new that you didn’t know before.”

“For as he reads so will he write” seems to be a recurring message of American presidents of yesteryears to their fortuitous sons.

I was a slow reader in my pre-teen years.

When I finally caught the reading bug (before my 7th birthday), I was so enthralled I wanted to read everything readable that crossed my path. Newspaper clippings, old book covers, advertising billboards, occasional comic books, I read them all. I had a voracious appetite for books. I still do.

That was in the early 1970s in my remote corner of Nigeria. In those days, books were not so easy to come by for a precocious, insatiably curious peasant boy. Me.

In the mid-1970s, the government introduced Universal Basic Education (UBE). This resulted in multi-fold enrolment in primary schools. The school day ran in two sessions. The morning session ends at about noon while the second immediately takes off with classes ending around 4.00 pm.

I soon read through all the few books available in our bench-top size class library in a matter of days.

I can’t read enough, because I didn’t have enough books to read.

As my hobby caught on, I soon joined a cycle of like-minded friends. Reading was our primary source of information and entertainment, and the only means for our getting previews of the world outside our rustic village.

Transistor radios were common, but not every home had one. Mine had none.

Television came in 10 years later, when public power finally reached my village in the early 1980s. My home had no TV either.

In my high school days, I spent every spare change on books.

I was so obsessed with books that my dad was concerned I would spend all my money on them. His fears turned out to be otherwise, though.

Midway into my secondary school days, the Pacesetter series came up. Passing from hand to hand, we couldn’t get hold of enough of these novels. That was back in the early 1980s. Back then we had the African Writers Series as well, but the Pacesetters series was more appealing.

Image source: Becoming The Muse

Five decades of life’s stream have since flown under the bridge. Life has been happening and my reading pace now lags, yet my lifelong partnership with books hasn’t abated.

One thing bibliophiles would rather do than any other thing is to read. Every spare moment is time to read.

In 2023, I read 12 books. My library keeps expanding. But in 2024, I’ll be focussing more on writing.

Here are my favorite quotes on reading (pros and cons)

1. Bibliophiles must also get (books) out of their heads and get into real life. A timeless piece of advice from one of my all-time favorite classics illustrates this point so well. The protagonist in George Eliot’s The Mill on The Floss, Margaret Tulliver, was a lover of books. On one occasion, her less-disposed to books father had to tell his clever daughter. “I can’t do wi’ knowin’ so many things besides my work. That’s what brings folks to the gallows, — knowin’ everything but what they’n got to get their bread by.”

2. “Ashley was bred to read books and nothing else. That doesn’t help a man pull himself out of a tough fix, like we’re all in now.” Scarlett O’Hara, the main protagonist in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, said this, after realizing that her love for Ashley was only an infatuated child’s fancy and that Ashley truly loved his wife Melanie. The message is clear, in life, readers who apply what they learned are the ones that thrive most through their readings.

3. In his book, The Art and Business of Online Writing: How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention, Nicolas Cole stated what has since become a guiding principle for me as a writer and author. Mr. Cole explained how reading too much can be counterproductive for writers who want to improve their craft.
   
   The truth is, reading is only one part of the equation. And at a certain point, reading more books isn’t going to make you a better writer. It’s going to make you a better reader.
   
   His noteworthy suggestion is that writers should focus more on writing and publishing their works, rather than consuming other people’s content.

   
   Rather than reading copious volumes of others’ works as the only means for improving their own, he advised writers to learn from feedback, analytics, and data, rather than from opinions, theories, and assumptions.

4. In his book, Narratives of The Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass the former slave who became a foremost abolitionist, recounts how his master prevented his wife from teaching him to read and write. He justified it by saying that learning would corrupt the best slave in the world.

   
   “If you give a n***** an inch, he will take an ell. A n***** should know nothing but to obey his master — to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best n***** in the world. Now . . . if you teach that n***** (speaking of [Douglass]) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”

   
   Realizing that education was the key to liberation, Douglass resolved to learn as much as he could, despite the obstacles and dangers stacked against him.

   
   He wrote: “These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought.”

5. And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. ~ (Holy Bible — Ecclesiastes 12:12)

Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah wrote The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. As inimitable as Shakespeare and all the other classics are, I dare say that there are still more beautiful stories and books to be written. The most intriguing books, essays, and articles (yours and maybe mine) are yet to be written.

During my time in primary school in the 1970s, it only took me a few weeks to read all the grade-specific books in my class library. Today, it would take me multiple lifetimes to read all the books in my ever-growing pocket-based e-library.

I’ve been keeping records of the total number of books I read per year since the year 2010. In 2023, I averaged 12 books. In 2024, my average count may go up or lower than last year’s numbers. It won’t matter so much.

One thing is certain, I’ll be majoring more in writing in 2024.

Source

© Martin W. Sandler, The Letters of John F. Kennedy, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013

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