Martin
reading.
What made me.

01 / The beginning

Before I had a theory, I had Look and Learn.

When I was a child, I read Look and Learn extensively. It was probably the biggest single thing I read a lot of. It offered a child a wide world: science, history, animals, technology, geography and extraordinary facts, all arriving together before I had any neat division between subjects.

I also read boxes and boxes of science fiction. J. G. Ballard and Isaac Asimov were part of that early landscape. Those books mattered because they made science feel like wonder: not only a set of facts, but a way of imagining what the world was, what it might become and what kind of creatures we might be inside it.

03 / Mind and body

Psychology made the human world strange.

At school I read the complete Dictionary of American Psychology — about twelve volumes, as I remember it. It was fascinating because it opened up a huge vocabulary of psychological issues and types of experience. The mind became a field of possibilities, explanations and problems.

In Form Five I also read a book whose title I remember as something like Sexual Perversions. I remember its blunt opening line and the shock of reading, as a sixteen-year-old, about the range of sexual fetishes and sexual lives that existed in the world. It was important to me because it made diversity real. Human beings were not one narrow pattern.

05 / Finding a vocabulary

Ayn Rand helped me articulate selfishness.

When I was about twenty-one I was introduced to Ayn Rand, especially The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I also read The Virtue of Selfishness. They were incredible books for me: not because they ended the argument, but because they gave shape to an understanding I had been carrying without being able to articulate.

Rand helped me say that selfishness could be a good thing — not merely greed, but the idea that a person’s own life, judgement and flourishing could be legitimate ends. Around then I also began to understand that the way the world works is not necessarily based on things being the best, or even apparently the best. A powerful book can change the question you think you are asking.

06 / What reading does not do

Being well-read does not make a person wise.

When I was young, I thought that if you could explain things, educate people and understand the world, people would make the right decisions. I have since learned that this is not how people or history work. People do not operate simply on what the right thing is.

Have all those books made me more successful? No. I have enjoyed myself, and there are certainly conversations where I can contribute a little knowledge because I have read a great deal. But being well-read does not make people better people, better judges, more moral or more ethical. It does not guarantee consistently better insight.

History makes the same point. We are told that if we do not know history, it will repeat itself. But we know history and still repeat it. A historical example may inform a decision, but there is no reason to assume that a decision based on history is necessarily better than one based on what we observe now.

Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable. Put a naked human being almost anywhere and we work things out. We do not need to have read ten thousand books before we can begin to live. Reading is valuable to me because it has been enjoyable, enlarging and sometimes clarifying — not because it reliably makes people do the right thing.