Mike Hamblyn is half amused, half irritated by David Hill's seemingly holier-than-thou tone in his recent column on reading.
David Hill suggests most men don't read novels because they're too busy or it's seen as an unmanly pastime.
He then patronises a geologist who doesn't read novels by calling him "nice" and rubs salt into the poor man's wounds by insisting he (Hill) can be transported by novels but not by, say, a geological treatise.
Well, allow me to differ! Perhaps the geologist had read novels and simply didn't feel he had to justify his reading habits.
And anyway, where's it written one should read novels? What's wrong with not reading fiction? Is the geologist more or less of a man or human being because of it? Does it mean the school system failed? Of course not.
Perhaps Mr Hill ought to get out more. A geological field trip might be in order.
Or, closer to home, he might have a look at the Periodic Table of the Elements like I did.
Because when I saw the table, really saw it for the first time, I found it a near-religious experience.
I had an epiphany and the table transported me to the same place that the novels I adore have taken me.
Allow me to explain.
Thanks to a mixture of immaturity and personal trauma, I left school at 15 at the end of what was then the fourth form in 1973.
I had learnt to distrust both books and adults. But novels were a welcome relief and I read them greedily.
I loved them because they allowed me to escape an intolerable present and they didn't preach.
Stories presented me with an alternate reality which was as real as the one I had to return to when I closed the book and returned to work on factory floors and construction sites.
Moby Dick was a great favourite.
I worshipped Balzac and Dickens; Camus was another, just a few of the hundreds of authors I read.
Novels, to paraphrase the Tyrell Corporation, made me feel "more human than human".
And it wasn't just fiction I read. I was "with" Auguste Piccard when he made his first balloon ride into the stratosphere.
I was "with" Armstrong and Aldrin as they broke free of the Lunar Command Module, rolled the Eagle on to her back and began their long, slow, desperately dangerous descent to the Sea of Tranquillity.
And I was with the younger Piccard and Don Walsh as they they peered through the fused quartz porthole of their bathysphere when they descended 35,800ft down into the Mariana Trench.
But reading, be it fact or fiction (or a mixture), could not help me escape the grind of unrewarding jobs: I needed an education.
To this end, I enrolled at Wellington High School's evening institute to begin school certificate.
I planned on science and English for the first year and then more school cert in year two, then university entrance, again at night school.
Such was my ignorance, I didn't even know I could have gone to university at 21, sans SC or UE.
The problem was, I still distrusted "book learning" - no two authors agreed with each other and as an autodidact, I had no way of knowing how to negotiate the world of knowledge.
Therefore, I needed teachers and when I entered the classroom for my first lesson, it was with considerable trepidation. But I shouldn't have worried.
My first lesson was science. Mr Nairn, the chemistry teacher, pulled down a vinyl sheet on which was emblazoned the Periodic Table of the Elements.
He explained that the universe was made up of elements, each one of which was a building block.
Each block had its own personality and the genius of Dimitri Mendeleyev's table was that it enabled scientists to predict the quality of elements as yet undiscovered.
Mr Nairn further explained that each of the elements had their own characteristics and the noble gases, for example, were so-named because they were non-reactive and did not mingle easily with other elements.
The spillover for me was intense and total: even now, I always think of the noble gases when I hear Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, Suite No.2, with the entry of the Montagues and the Capulets.
To me, the table and that lesson were a revelation.
The universe now had a pattern, an order, a rationality I hadn't known was there. It wasn't an arbitrary or insane place after all.
I left the class an hour later, walking on air.
From that moment, reading, which hitherto had been a hobby, became a compulsion and it led me to careers in freelance journalism, librarianship and bookselling, and to this day I regard books, libraries and the free press as sacred.
Some of us will always read fiction and others won't. Each to their own, I say.
If we draw a distinction by praising those who read novels and patronising those who don't, where might that lead?
At worst, if judging one another hardens into an ideological train station, then we might wind up sentencing people who read novels to the left, while non-readers are herded to the right, as overhead an ironic sign proclaims: "Reading Makes You Free".
- Mike Hamblyn is an avid reader and a Dunedin bookseller.
