Back to the Past by Jeff Quest

Back to the Past

by Jeff Quest

I would love to say I was the 19-20-year-old who read Proust and Pynchon with regularity and could quote from the oeuvre of Whitman and Wordsworth; but I wasn’t then, and still am not now.

Instead, where I found myself in the year 1996 was that for the first time I was within walking distance to three bookstores, had access to a university library with tons of books/scripts, and more time to dedicate to reading than I can even imagine currently. That time of my life was when my reading options began to expand beyond the low-hanging fruit.

I was very much into the branded sci-fi/fantasy of the time so the Star Wars X-Wing novels and various Star Trek books loomed large in my reading. For all of my fantasy reading of the time, I managed to skip the book released that year that would come to dominate the fantasy world over the past ten years—A Game of Thrones.

My mystery/thriller/espionage fandom hadn’t fully formed yet. I would pick up the likely suspects you’d find in the drug store spinner rack, Cussler, Clancy, Ludlum, but I hadn’t yet tried some of the more challenging authors that now top my favorites list like Eric Ambler, John le Carré, or Len Deighton. I’d read Sherlock Holmes and other mysteries, but I’m happy that my mystery reading has broadened to include fun series authors like Rex Stout, SJ Rozan, and Will Thomas plus a recent class has introduced me to several authors whose work has been translated into English.

I did find one enduring read that I can trace back to that particular year – P.G. Wodehouse. His Mr. Mulliner omnibus introduced me to an unknown world of vicars, broadway producers, movie stars and writers who proceed to get into more zany situations than you can shake a stick at. He’s a writer that I love to return to, especially any time when life gets stressful and I need to shift to a different world where the stakes are low.

1996 also found my reading including a lot of plays and I discovered one of my favorite playwrights – David Ives. Although it’s almost always preferable to watch theater rather than read it, in Ives’ case the reading is just as pleasurable. His beguiling short play The Universal Language, about a con man that “teaches” his students how to speak his “universal language” made up of nonsense words, is one of my favorites. Back in ‘96 I was dying to perform in one of his short plays and I pledged to will a production of his work into existence, something I eventually succeeded in doing five years later. That show was also how I started dating my wife, so the seeds of my life now were truly planted back in 1996.

Jeff Quest is a reader with less time to read than he’d prefer. He writes about spy fiction at SpyWrite.com and podcasts on Nero Wolfe at LikeTheWolfe.com, Mick Herron at BarbicanStation.com and spies at Spybrary.com.

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