There are all sorts of different readers out there, from voracious bookworms to more reluctant readers who need a bit more time to find the book that really speaks to them. Although he is now a book publicist and book reviews editor, author Michael J. Seidlinger fell into the latter category. As a teen, Seidlinger was much more likely to be found jamming out to to heavy metal or playing videogames than reading, but then he found a book that made him broaden his horizons. Today, Michael is the author of a few adult novels and FALTER KINGDOM, his first foray into YA. He has written the blog post below to describe how books changed his life and how reluctant readers can learn to really love books.
Report’s due tomorrow.
Yeah, I know.
Did you read it yet?
I’m halfway through, I swear.
What do you think?
It was good but I’m not sure I could get into it.
That was me. The one who wouldn’t read more than a few pages, the one who read Cliff’s Notes or watched the film adaptation rather than spending the countless hours with my nose between the pages. I preferred to turn up the volume on the latest metal album, screaming along with what might be one of the best albums of the year. If not music, I preferred to watch a film or play a videogame --- believing that it was the most innovative storytelling platform and because videogames were an interactive medium full of possibility, the atmosphere of a story-driven game was second-to-none. I had no interest in reading. I rebelled against all the required reading, the book reports and the discourse teachers encouraged in class. Perhaps it was due to who I was, the rebellious one, the kid in school who went against the grain for the sake of not fitting into the mold.
Why would I want to read something? Actually read something, ink on a page, sentences, grammar, poetry? What to do with all the books that graced store shelves, and, more so, all the books that I wasn’t being assigned to read for a grade? They were typical airport thriller fodder, nothing that interested me. I looked at them the same way maybe someone did a script: nothing to see here when the preferred version would later make it to the silver screen. Why would I want to waste my time with all of that? I wasn’t willing to open my mind up to the possibilities.
I graduated from high school and instead of college --- though my parents had protested it --- I committed to a music career, believing wholeheartedly that I could make it work. I had the motivation, the willingness to learn where I was lacking, and, ego-driven as I was, the belief that I was good enough to make it as a musician. That’s what I thought for a long time. But then I went through my own rude awakening: the music I had given to myself fully, the bands I played in, the music I wrote, it all failed. Bands broke up. Record interest waned. Touring ended up with people exhausted and unwilling to ever talk to each other again.
What I found out, mere months into life after high school, life without trajectory, was that I didn’t have money. I needed to work. The band I was in, we all worked menial/part time jobs and I eventually found one in moving and construction. There was no guarantee I’d have work, but when I did, everything paused while I went to a construction site or a house, where we spent nearly the whole day, sometimes more, moving or building whatever it is that we were paid a couple hundred dollars to do.
And so too did the days. They became months, months became a year with only some minimal degree of progress on the demo (what we hoped to show record labels), and more so writing itself, the act and necessity of playing shows, which never seemed to be in the cards. By the time I reached age 22, I was disillusioned, completely distraught, and on the verge of quitting everything and returning home to the parents that had told me from the start that I would fail, the parents who told me I should have just gone to college.
I returned home and was quickly persuaded into enrolling into college classes. Ultimately, I ended up at University of Central Florida (UCF) majoring in art, and then art history, and then some sort of liberal studies program, before ending up with sociology. It wasn’t until I started in sociology that I found HOUSE OF LEAVES by Mark Z Danielewski --- a highly experimental book about a house that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside --- and quickly devoured it in a few sleepless nightly sessions. The book reached me like any of the others, by nature of class assignment, but now, so suddenly, something had changed: I let my guard down.
The euphoria of having read the book motivated the voracious purchasing and immediate reading of countless transgressive, noir, and other postmodern/experimental texts including THE STRANGER by Albert Camus, LIFE AFTER GOD by Douglas Coupland, THE COLLECTED STORIES by Amy Hempel, the work of the French Oulipos, including LIFE: A User's Manual by Georges Perec. The list went on and on.
I still don’t remember where or when or how (or why) I bothered trying to write, but reading almost immediately became an overnight passion --- by day I was already buying and building a collection/library of books. I hunted down different communities online, including HTMLGiant and the energetic indie lit community. I kept reading and I wrote a lot of really bad stuff. But somehow, it was the chance encounter with a single book that turned me into who I am today. If you told me I’d be a book publicist doubling as a book publisher and book reviews editor while, by night, writing books myself, I would have looked at you with dull eyes, figuring the mention for someone else. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be a sociologist.
Instead, I’m a writer, and it seems I’ve written this book (FALTER KINGDOM). Perhaps it could be for you what HOUSE OF LEAVES was for me: a book as unassuming and yet enticing, a clear indication that there’s a whole world out there within the pages of a book.
