Richard Hogan: Tell your children — life is an open book

After years of avoiding them, Richard Hogan eventually fell under the spell of books and says Ireland Reads Day this month is a great opportunity to captivate the next generation

Getting your children into the world of reading could be one of the most important gifts you give them, says Richard Hogan - ahead of Ireland Reads Day on February 28. iStock

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

I still remember lying down on my bed and reading those opening words to JD Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye for the first time. They reached out from somewhere and dragged me into a world I didn’t know existed at that young age.

For years, my parents tried, to varying success and failure, to get me into reading. Dyslexia disrupted that journey.

I found books static and boring. I loved the outside world of activity and adventure. Climbing trees, hoarding conkers, and breaking bones. That was my early childhood.

I didn’t want to read about children climbing trees or playing football, I wanted to do it for myself. Slowing down to read words was something I found difficult. My young mind raced with a desire for adventure and experience. It still does.

I tried

Moby Dick, White Fang, Tom Sawyer,

etc, but they didn’t really capture my attention. My mind was moving too fast to take in the words.

My parents even gave me football books, Hot Shot Hamishand Mighty Mouse,but again they didn’t really do it for me.

I mean, I read them, and loved seeing the ball curl into the top corner but I wasn’t convinced on the storytelling. It seemed the same every week. I bored easily.

Anyway, I wanted to curve the ball myself and play like George Best or Ray Houghton.

And so for years I flirted with reading, I’d buy books only to leave them unread. I loved poetry. They were short and abstract and made so much sense to me.

Richard Hogan: "As a child, every book brought me into a new world"

My mind kind of worked in the abstract anyway, I thought in metaphors and similes. I would read The Norton Anthology of Poetry. I could sit for hours reading poetry, just one more. Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, John Keats, Yeats, all favourites of mine.

I was only 13 when I first read The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot. It blew my head right off my shoulders. No other poem hit me like that poem did. It was the voice, the distinctive voice of the narrator.

I was Prufrock, lonely and disillusioned with modern society and unsure how to progress.

When I first heard the song, Stuck In The Middle With You by Stealers Wheel, I thought Prufrock had come to life and captured his experience in melody. The images in Prufrock, the allusions to the classical world, the sheer scope of what Eliot was attempting to do, still captures my imagination.

I have been formulated and sprawling on a pin many times in my life.

But it wasn’t until I took a book down from the shelf one evening and went upstairs and lay on my bed and opened it and read those first lines, that things changed utterly for me.

Put simply, they were never the same again after that fateful encounter with Holden Caulfield.

Again, it was his distinctive voice, the recalcitrant spirit of the idealistic teenage heart, raging on the page. Every word reverberated with rebellion.

I was Holden, angry with the adult world, and desperately trying to protect Phoebe from those corrupted adults. I didn’t want to become one of them, a sell-out to the corporate machine.

Every page I turned was better than the last. When I finished the book, I immediately started it again.

It was like the first time I watched Stand By Me. I watched that movie a thousand times as a kid. I wanted to write just like Gordie Lachance, I was him; misunderstood by his parents, isolated and lonely.

I was Ferris Bueller, too. A trouble-maker and wild. I’ve been Prufrock, Caufield, Lachance, Bueller, Lady Lazurus, an old man at sea, running with bulls, a guy walking around Dublin, a guy waiting for his friend to turn up, a guy waiting at the train for his girlfriend to turn up, a guy helping his bigger, awkward friend to work ranches, and many more.

Ireland Reads Day

Every book brought me into a new world. The reason I’m talking about all of this is because Saturday, February 28 is Ireland Reads Day.

Ireland Reads is a national campaign inspiring people to ‘get lost in a good book’. It’s a wonderful initiative encouraging readers to explore recommendations from their local library.

Getting children into books is a life-long sustaining gift. It’s probably more difficult than ever with the arrival of endless internet access.

But books teach our children about the human condition. They learn about sadness, isolation, coming of age, joy, love, friendship, all the wonderful aspects of being a human being. They hear about them through the words of great thinkers and philosophers.

It is in books where children learn about themselves and the world around them.

When I flicked those early pages of Catcher In The Rye I was flicking into my future. I met someone who spoke directly to me, he still does.

I still read that novel from time to time. I watch Stand By Me too. It’s important not to lose that child.

Getting your children into the world of reading could be one of the most important gifts you give them.