Bruce McCall
I grew up imbibing Dickens every high-school afternoon in a corner of my coffin-like lower bunk in a claustrophobic apartment bedroom in Toronto's dreary far east end. This embedded the idea in my impressionable teenage mind that reading was a private function to be performed only in physical isolation, indoors and ideally amid crepuscular Victorian gloom, a minor vice as thrilling as sneaking a tot of laudanum in the pantry.
A cramped and clammy approach to reading pleasure, in short. Only decades later, on a tropical vacation, did the veil lift. Why hadn't anybody told me that taking a book outdoors and reading it in the fresh air miraculously opens vistas both metaphorical and literal? The alchemy of fresh air on the act of reading expands the mind, widens the perspective, reboots the imagination and sharpens the appetite. The world - including the world inside your head - is suddenly a larger, richer place. And it affects not only how but what you read.
Envy me lounging in my deck chair on the sun-bleached deck of my Caribbean bungalow, facing east toward a limitless ocean horizon in late afternoon as the sun slides down behind Mount Nevis. Ripe mangoes thud to the ground from the nearby tree and the daily delegation of vervet monkeys bickers in the foliage 20 feet away. Thus ensconced, I wallow in the joys of literary archeology afforded by taking my reading out under the sun. I find, as a random example, that a long-forgotten paperback of Noel Coward short stories, its pages now as brown as if they'd been toasted, reads as smart and clever as Brett Easton Ellis when removed from hiding and subjected to a tropic sun. Even Barbara Pym's faded fictional chronicles of tea-time in churchly, suburban, mid-fifties England virtually zip. So liberated is the cocooned indoor mind by exposure to sunshine and cooling zephyrs that everything stale - mouldy old Dreiser, dusty old Wharton, musty old Ford Madox Ford - turn crisp and vital again when devoured out of doors.
Typical victim of that pernicious urban dictate that you should read only books you've recently read about, I could never tunnel into The Moon and Sixpence sitting in my New York eyrie; there on my sundeck, all the stale literary air is blown away and, hey presto, Maugham's broodings on the human condition are as piquant and alive as anything by Ian McEwan.
It's literary cryogenics, restoring life to the dead, and it leaves me baffled about that zombified pastime of Western civilization known as "beach reading," rooted in the premise that nothing read outdoors should demand more concentrative energy than acquiring a suntan, perhaps for fear of overtaxing the sun-fried brain.
So let the beach readers laze through their cheesy drugstore paperbacks; sitting out there in the balmy Caribbean breeze, I've got a date with … James Gould Cozzens?
Bruce McCall is an illustrator and author of several books, including the memoir Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada.