No frills. Busy reading.
I am making up for years lost, years focused on 10-page medical review articles, chapters on next-generation sequencing, neurofibromatosis, Birt-Hogg-Dube syndrome. For at least a decade, the number of novels read per year has been in the low single digits. If there is to be a transition to a life as a writer, I need to step that up, and not as a grind but as a joy.
When I was 10, maybe 12, I read a lot. Everything. My dad was a CPA in Baltimore and he hired me to be a “runner” for his firm, getting stamps, lunch for him and his partner, Fred Koehler: tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich from the little restaurant next door on South Street. I ventured past the strip clubs on Baltimore Street to get documents from clients, buy stamps at the post office, and get tax forms. But most of the time there was nothing to do but sit around. So I read the Readers Digest. Can’t remember whether it was Reader’s or Readers’ but it was mine, all the articles, even the ones that at first didn’t seem to interesting, ‘Improving Your Word Power’ – multiple choice vocabulary quizzes. At home we had abridged versions of novels that I devoured, hours prone on my bed until my shoulder’s ached.
In high school and college I read, but, as the motivation was not entirely for pleasure, somehow there was something less of that. After Hamilton, I taught high-school English for 2 years and of course read the books I taught, now with an eye to determining how I could teach them, select vocabulary for quizzes, topics for essay questions. Curiously, I seemed to understand the books better but enjoy them just a little less.
Then medical school, and the fundamentals shifted again. Even more reading, and pleasure was purely the product of capturing an elusive prey – the fund of knowledge sufficient to keep me from harming a patient with a mistake, a bad decision. The stakes were high.
I recall one afternoon in my second year at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (MS-II at USUHS) that I decided to skip classes (gasp!) and re-read Crime and Punishment. The pleasure was surreptitious and transient. Then back to neuroanatomy and histology, plotlines less riveting but more enduring for a physician in training.
But were they more enduring?
Certainly my study of gram-negative bacteria has helped my prescribe the most effective antibiotics for a 3-year-old with meningitis. How has my careful consideration of John McPhee’s and Dostoevsky’s creative genius helped me understand my patients’ stories, their emotions and complex logic? Immensely, from the perspective of a long career as a poor country geneticist.
Now I think the reading bug is back: the office floor is littered with journals and books, some half read, others done and cherished. The most recent was “The Which Way Tree” by Elizabeth Crook. The last of what I would want to do is spoil any of it for you if you haven’t yet read it, but I will admit that the pace and wit and voice of the central character, Benjamin Shreve, has wormed its way into my head, and now I understand why, when his name was mentioned at the San Antonio Book Festival a month or so ago, a large contingent of the audience rose as one and commenced to applaud. When I reluctantly finished the last page, there were sighs and tears.
It’s good to read.
Scott D. McLean, MD 