I never thought I would say this, but I am looking forward to reading my first Louis L'Amour book! Many thanks to AJ for pointing me in the direction of L'Amour's memoir Education of a Wandering Man. I don't think he is actually 'lost in the stacks', considering my library's copy of the book was checked out as recently as this past December, but it was completely unknown to me (I don't think I would have been perusing his books otherwise), so maybe it is to you as well. He is, of course, best known for his many Westerns, but it is a genre I have never been drawn to. He wrote nearly 90 novels and I think he is much loved and well known (and probably still hugely popular?) as his books have been translated into more than twenty languages and appear to still be in print. Education of a Wandering Man was published posthumously and chronicles his early life and education.
Born in 1908 in North Dakota L'Amour left school at the age of fifteen and spent his younger years moving about as an itinerant worker. He traveled widely not only in the Western United States but also to Europe and Asia and the Middle East. He led a colorful and adventurous life, which likely fueled his later writing. And he was a voracious reader and autodidact. It sounds as though he read at whim and read for pleasure.
"...Louis was anything but a systematic reader. A spectacularly serendipitous reader, he enlists us in the joys of random reading--from Schliermacher's Soliloquies, Boswell's Johnson, Bertrand Russell's Marriage and Morals, Eric Hoffer's True Believer, Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies to Roger Baldwin's Liberty Under the Soviets--with an occasional dip into George Santayana, Joseph Conrad, and Rabindranath Tagore and some frolics by the way in Baudelaire's poems, Claude McKaye's Harlem Shadows, Frank Dobie's Longhorns, Polybius' histories, and Voltaire's Candide. Good, bad, or indifferent, fiction or nonfiction, classic or ephemera--all were grist for his mill! But unlike many self-educated men and other storytellers, Louis was a good listener, as eager to learn from the spoken as from the printed word."
It sounds as though he was an 'equal opportunity' reader as he "was utterly without intellectual snobbery or cultural pretensions".
"The love of books made him--like any other lover--sometimes excessively charitable to his authors. And this, too, made him rare among copious readers. In this volume you will find enthusiasm, excitement, and gratitude to the whole miscellany of authors ancient and modern, East and West. That was Louis's way--to find or squeeze something of value from every printed page.
I like this as I find I am often a very forgiving reader, too, so am glad to know I am not alone in my approach to books. It sounds as though he never worried about whether a book fitted into his reading plans and his reading was filled with an assortment of interesting juxtapositions--Shakespeare's Sonnets and Jack London's adventure stories or Rudyard Kipling and Percy Bysshe Shelley. And in the Thirties when he was wandering there were a plethora of reading choices with so many excellent outlets for books and good publishers: F.N. Doubleday, Max Schuster, Alfred Knopf, Bennett Cerf, Modern Library, Book-of-the-Month Club (when it was still quite distinguished), and the Literary Guild.
"Louis gives us a lesson--too seldom offered by academic or professional critics--in open-mindedness and literary charity. And he encourages us, too, to become Wandering Readers, joining his search for the joys and surprises in the pages of books."
Sounds good, don't you think?