“Oh I’m going to read 52 books this year. You’re a loser because you’re not.”

Dear Reader,

I certainly hope all has been well with and for you since we last checked in… oh, a few months ago. Hey, I know I was on a relative hot streak for a minute with a mini-streak of quasi-regular updates, and it felt good and we all liked it; you know how life goes though, right? Sometimes it just throws a lot at you and there are bigger priorities to which we must attend. Or, at least that’s what I tell myself. Maybe that’s the ADHD, too, or some other differently wired parts of my brain interpreting the world for me. With some neurodivergent brains, we hyperfocus; we get a Thing and that’s our Thing and, boy oh boy, do we ever love that thing. I love the Toronto Raptors, I love music, I love video games, I comic books and books and poetry and sports writing, driving myself to borderline madness from exhaustion, jokes become behaviours, and blah blah blah. Lots of stuff I love. Some of those loves get more shine than others, of course, because anyone who says they don’t have a favourite child is a liar; the Raptors get a lot of my energy whether we’re* good or bad, music is a constant, and things sort of ebb and flow from there. Sometimes it really feels like I have a choice in the matter, and other times it doesn’t quite feel that way. Oh I know, we always have a choice, isn’t that what they say? We have Free Will! We can do anything we put our minds to! Lolololol. Okay; if only that were the case. Sadly, free will, choice and the ability to exercise the choice, are all different things, aren’t they? Maybe they aren’t. To be clear, I’m no philosopher—despite what the title and my musings might lead you, Dear Reader, to believe—so maybe the concepts I’ve been mentioning are just hogwash and sheepdip, and I’ve got no clue. Remember, that’s always a good bet to take against me.

When I was young, my father told me, “Henry, in this life there’s two things we can do: we can blind with brilliance, or we can baffle with bullshit,” and he left it at that. I’m not sure it’s as binary a choice as that, but, I suppose, at the end of the day maybe it is. Now, my father also told, “Henry, in this life there’s two things we can do: we can stay quiet and allow the presumption of stupidity, or we can open our mouths and confirm the presumption.” It seems my father gave me a lot of advice operating with little room for choice, huh? Whatever the case is, I try to get on both sides of it all. I mean, as much fulfilling as it can be to blind with brilliance, baffling is often infinitely more fun. Staying quiet, and allowing others to assume stupidity? Ooh, I like that feeling, too, but if the assumption is there, please allow me continue to misdirect along that line of thinking. Oh hello, that’s my ego making an appearance, but we’re all allowed our guilty pleasures. And hey! Doesn’t Krishna tell Arjuna how important it is to strive to see things with equal vision?

I often yammer on about things my old man impressed upon me when I was young. Probably he was the louder of my parents. My mother, of course, gave me lots of wonderful advice over the years. For example, when we were listening to the Les Misérables (Original 1985 London Cast Recording, of course), she would always tell me to remember Gavroche and his song Little People and the message that anyone can do anything and great things come from unexpected places. Of course, I was also encouraged to read and to read voraciously. Mind you, my mother also gifted me the book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Professor Pierre Bayard. So, read a lot, expect the unexpected, don’t let the hype fool you… and also know how to talk about books you haven’t read? Lots to unpack there. In (quickly) reading an interview with Prof. Bayard, however, an interesting question is raised—maybe Barthes would have liked this—what is reading anyway? More to the point, Bayard says, “I mean, the first important point is try to stop being guilty about books.” Books are awesome. Reading is great. I hope one day a lot of people read my poetry and ready my books and novellas and stories; that would really be the wind up my skirt, you know? But—and there’s always a but—since we’re in still in the Winter, we’re still in that window of time where maybe some people are sticking to their New Year’s Resolutions of working out more, eating better, reading more, less screen time, blah blah blah blah. Reading seems to be one of those things to which there’s some sort of strained cultural moral attachment: the more you read, the better a person you are, and the less you read, the more debased and depraved a person you are. Not to mention, there’s the additional layer of what people think about what you’re reading, to which Bayard has another lovely point: “I am sure the person with whom you are speaking does not know the book as much as you think, you know?” Right? Isn’t that lovely? You could read 104 books a year, let’s say all Young Adult or (the late, great, defunct and now-swallowed up) TSR fantasy books, which probably aren’t the most challenging and academically rigourous reads in the world and you can be sure someone will turn up their nose and say, “oh, not reading Ulysses?” like they’re reading it or something. So, read comic books, read sportswriting, read magazines, read books from the grocery store, ready The Classics… or don’t.

Oh, what am I currently reading, you ask? Great question. Currently, I am in love with The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman, with Soul of a Chef (also Ruhlman) on deck, a couple of Thomas Keller books—you can see where my fixation currently lies—and then we’ll see what comes my way from the library. I’ve had a good reading year so far with Medium Raw, Kitchen Confidential, and A Cook’s Tour (all Anthony Bourdain) out of the way, as well as Heat 2 (Michael Mann & Meg Gardiner), and Rebel Chef (Dominique Crenn); I’ve also got The Road Home (Jim Harrison), and Ham on Rye (The Almighty Bukowski), though being physical copies and my own copies and not from the library, I am reading these last two slightly less voraciously. Oh, I bet that sounds like I am quite the bibliophile. Quite the reader. Just a good, moral person feeding his brain with the written word. Lol, okay hold onto your seats for confession time: the Bourdain books are fun and engaging with a really clear voice and a lot of personality and I absolutely understand why so many people connected with Saint Tony, but I’m not sure he’d be setting the academic world on fire with his writing; Heat 2 read like a pretty good action movie—it’s a lot of fun and I recommend it, but probably it isn’t winning any highfalutin awards; Rebel Chef, similarly, was fun and interesting, and a really cool look into Dominque Crenn’s world and what made and makes her tick, and her approach to cooking and life in hospitality—again, probably not going to be on a lot of Literature (whatever that is, anyway) curriculums. The Road Home and Ham on Rye, maybe here we’re starting to get a little bit more elevated in with respect to all things “literary”, and even then I’m probably rounding up when it comes to Buck. All of this is to say, I suppose, that we should read what we like when want to read and we should feel like it’s fun and engaging and exciting and relieving and opens windows for us to fly through and doors for us to walk through and tunnels through which we can escape. If it’s The Idiot or War and Peace and all of the classics? Hurray. That’s awesome. Tell me all about it; help me go from not reading a book to wanting to read a book. If you’re like me and reading three things at once because your brain tells you that’s a good way to digest information and the books are a collection of Gordon Korman, grocery store checkout best-sellers, and a required textbook for a class you don’t want to take? That’s just as great. As a hero of mine, Roland Barthes, might say: we’re always interpreting text around us. In one writer’s humble opinion, so long as we’re using our brain enough that we don’t develop Brain Rust—that is, to say, lazy, as-the-wind-blows thinking—we’ll be okay.

A big caveat to the above paragraph so this doesn’t get lost in the mix: the Michael Ruhlman books are absolutely stellar. I can’t recommend them enough. The Making of a Chef is a lot of philosophy, a lot of worldview, a lot of why; this is the kind of stuff that keeps my teeth white. There’s a lot of pain, I think, that comes through; a lot of chasing, a lot of yearning, a lot of focus on achieving platonic ideals and somehow holding onto them for more than a minute. The act and art of cooking professionally—home cooking is a different art entirely, I’m sure everyone will agree on—requires focus, commitment, dedication, unwillingness to yield to ease, but also recognizing there inherently has to be bending in the world, there inherently has to be some sort of give or it all comes crashing down. At this stage in my life, I’m not going to become a chef—I talked about that with my chef the other day—but I can consume and digest these books articulating the philosophies and approaches—Christina Tosi’s memoir Dessert Can Save The World! is dynamite—and find throughlines and intersections with the guiding principles of my life. The Making of a Chef is a beautiful introspection into an alchemical world full of scents and smells and touches and sounds while trying to somehow magic it all together while Time, The Destroyer, marches on and on and on in the background. Maybe you’re not interested, maybe you are interested, but this is worth reading.

HEY! And just so we’re clear here! Read whatever you damn well please! Reading isn’t some moral exercise. Reading isn’t something that makes anyone bigger or better than anyone else. Literacy comes in all forms. There are fucking geniuses who read a book a day (probably?) who don’t have a goddamn clue about how their banking works. There are doctors and scientists who have zero interpersonal literacy; sure, they can cut someone open and do whatever it is they do, but they don’t know how to be kind. There are people who never read anything but clickbait articles through instagram because their lives are full of trauma and pain and headaches and nightmares and they escape through writing that is light and fluffy and fun and charming.

Have fun out there, be safe, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!