Reading For Fun, From Hersey To Hornby To Haring

I read very few books in junior high and high school. I didn't supplement this poor habit by reading magazines or newspapers either, except the comics, sports section, and occasional secondhand Sports Illustrated lent from my best friend Steve Baril, who had a subscription. I watched lots of television.

I got by with skimming and Master Plots, and still managed to be an A student in a small town public school system. Pleasure reading was not on my radar. The first book I ever read and enjoyed was A Bell For Adano, a book hand-selected for me from a list of required tomes in eleventh grade by the wise teacher Mr. D'Andrea. He presumed it would appeal to my Italian roots, and he was right. Of course it was also an acknowledged classic, winning the Pulitzer Prize for its author, John Hersey, in 1945. Thanks to Amazon, I was able to reread it last year.

 

This opened a window: reading could be pleasurable if it was something you were interested in. I read a series of sports books, including Bo Knows Bo by Bo Jackson and Drive by Larry Bird. And in the last few years more books on New England sports, Now I can Die In Peace, Moving the Chains, and Wicked Good Year. I recommend them all. Sports reading might not qualify as literature, but it's a start. And the gap is bridged with Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, about his relationship with London football squad Arsenal, the team that was my local while living in Islington 7 years ago.

 

 

My pleasure reading, or voluntary reading, didn't really resume until after college, when I found that reading helped me stay calm while riding the New York City subways during the rush hour commutes. I've been an avid book buyer and a moderate reader ever since.

I just finished reading Keith Haring's Journals, which took me over a year. I've finished a bunch of other books in the meantime. I was really savoring his meteoric life. Haring was one of the most prolific artists ever. He created a hybrid drawing-painting style that was marginalized by the serious museums by embraced but galleries, collectors, non-profits, hospitals, and pretty much anyone who needed a mural or has a good cause. It'd be fascinating to imagine how his work might have progressed had he not died of AIDS at age 31.

 

More Lichtenstein than Warhol, Haring bridged the gap between high and low art, between museum culture and street culture. But I think it was his embrace of commercial dissemination - his pop shops, t-shits, and general willingness to lend his art to massive commercial reproduction, that led to his work becoming part of the popular consciousness, and its related dispersal into the minds of suburban kids like me. His Journals opened an intimate window into his tumultuous decade of creativity, collaboration, production, hectic travel, sex, popular success, and relationship strife.

I've seen lots of his work over the years - mostly reproductions - but the one that stands out the most is the "Murale di Keith Haring," a building-sized mural he did in Pisa that I saw in 1994. Happily for me, the mural's creation is described in his Journals.