Welcome back to A Man Should Know, a weekly column from Elliot Ackerman about how today’s lost boys can become tomorrow’s good men. This week, Elliot is joined by Old School host Shilo Brooks to reflect on reading, and how the right books can change our lives.
I wasn’t much of a reader as a boy. On the weekends, my father insisted that my brother and I read for at least one hour on both Saturday and Sunday. He would send us up to our shared room, where my older brother, who was more academic than I was, would pore over Encyclopedia Brown novels, while I would only pretend to read, paging through The Boy’s King Arthur because it had cool illustrations.
This pattern persisted until I was 11, when I had what I consider my first great reading experience.
My father had assigned me a book, Ender’s Game, the science-fiction classic by Orson Scott Card. Every Saturday and Sunday, he’d send me up to my room to make progress on the novel, which is the story of a 6-year-old boy, Ender, who is recruited into an intergalactic war. At an excruciatingly slow pace, I dragged my way through the first hundred or so pages, spending most of that hour staring out the window or secretly surfing the web on our 56K dial-up modem. I wasn’t really giving the book a chance.
After a few weeks—a pace at which any reasonable person would’ve made it through the book—my father asked me how it was going. I fibbed, telling him I was almost done and would likely finish that day. When the hour was up, and I came out of my room, my father was waiting for me.
