#011 Riaan Wolmarans | Dusting off the bookshelf

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [01:17]Well, it's a great way to get knowledge into your head, first of all. But, you know, it's come a long way. I mean, my mother was a primary school teacher, so she ensured that by the time I went to grade one, I was already able to read, and it meant that, you know, when the grade one teacher wanted some time to herself, she would tell little Riaan to read to the class because the rest of them were too stupid to read. So that's where it started, and then I became that little kid who went to the library five times a week and finished all his books by the very next day. And then, of course, that got to the point where the library said, well, why don't you just come and work here, since you're here all the time anyway. And that happened, and then I did work part-time at the library in between studying and doing other jobs. And throughout all that time, I've kept reading. I mean, the library job I had to go after a while because my journalism career took over all that time. I still refer to our house as the Mill Hill Branch Library. It's huge, the collection, and we certainly don't really buy any Kindle books. It's all made of paper.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [08:34]Well, my example I brought today is a book called Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. She is obviously a very acclaimed author. The book is highly acclaimed, and I tried, and you can see my bookmark there. It's about a third of the way through, and sometimes you read a book and you realize it's really good, it's well written, and clearly the author has skill in putting those words together on a page, but it just doesn't grip you. Clearly, it's won prizes, so there must be something in there, but you might feel like a bit of a failure, but you're just not going to finish this book, and life's too short. The same thing has happened to me with authors like Irvin Welsh, who tends to write in dialect. That can be very annoying. Especially when the dialogue becomes so almost illegible because you have to translate the dialect as it's written into something that sounds like you can, something you can understand.

Petro du Pisani, host · [09:21]Completely agree. Another book in this category is, I read the first book of Ken Follett's Century Trilogy, which is called Fall of Giants. And while I learned a lot about the First World War and what it was like to live in those times and all of that, after finishing that book, and it took me a long time to read it because it's also one of those tomes, and it was recommended to me by a very special friend who insisted that he loves Ken Follett's books, all of them. So I thought, let me try this book. So I read the first one. And then after I struggle through it, I've decided I'll give myself some time before I do the second book in the trilogy, and I, I think it was about four years ago, and I still haven't read the second book because I just can't bring myself to read more about the war and what Ken Follett does to his characters and makes them suffer. And it's really difficult to, to go through all of the suffering with them, so I'd rather read something a little bit more lighthearted.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [10:16]True, but also the main thing I think that we should agree on today is that it doesn't matter what you read. As long as you read and you enjoy it, it doesn't matter if it's Terry Pratchett book or a Booker Prize winning novel. Or the Bible or a nonfiction book, as long as you're reading and you're enjoying it. So you should never feel guilty about abandoning a certain book for whatever reason it is.

Petro du Pisani, host · [10:35]Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I've given myself permission to put a book down. If I've read about five to ten percent of it and I'm just not getting into it, it's okay. I can put it onto my abandoned shelf on Goodreads. It's fine. I just put it there and I never go back to it again, and I can forgive myself.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [24:54]Just building on what I said about Neil Gaiman, I also brought a book called Abharat by Clive Barker. I mean, he's quite a prolific fantasy author also. He's also very skilled at creating these amazing worlds that you, you can get, just get lost in, and, and the ideas and the creatures and people. In these worlds, it's something quite amazing. And then I brought a book by Chana Miavle that the British author called Unlondon. This specific book is called Unlondon, spelled U N L U N D U N. Now, Chana Miavle I discovered while living in the UK for a few years, and he is basically these other authors like Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, to the extreme. He takes what they do and makes it into a craft. Not that they're bad authors by any means, but he brings together your kind of fantasy elements with the most amazing ideas that I don't know where on earth he gets them from, and then writes them and brings into that history and philosophy. And all kinds of other interesting sciences and social sciences. And it's written in the most engaging way. You feel like you're learning as you go along about not only about things in your world, but also about just how amazing language can be. I went to a talk by him in London, which was fantastic. And London, for example, is... Imagine, if you will, there's an alternative London in reality, sort of side by side with a normal London, where broken things go. Broken things and broken people, and they end up in this slightly alternate reality that is un-London. he also wrote an amazing book called The City and the City, just to illustrate the way he thinks, and it's being made into a miniseries by the BBC, actually. I don't know how they're going to do it, because it's about two cities, two city-states like Singapore or Monaco, perhaps, that exist in exactly the same location. So you have one city and the buildings, but some buildings are in one city, which is a completely different nation from the other city, and people walk past each other in the street, but they're not allowed to look at some people because those are people from the other city, et cetera, et cetera. So it's those kind of ideas that really keep me engaged. And I think maybe it's, again, my job in a very fact-based environment, and why I say these books change my life is because they give me reason to escape from the world. And you need that as a journalist, because we get so sucked into the terrible news of the day. Everything is death, blood, corruption. I mean, those are the stories that make the news, that sell newspapers. So these books allow me to look at different realities and sort of, you know, get a bit of hope back for humankind.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [35:48]Oh, if you read a lot, you always fantasize about would you be able to write the next great American novel, next great horror novel, next great South African novel. But I think an art form that I've always admired in literature is the art of the short story. Obviously, there's great skill involved in writing a five hundred page tome about, you know, whichever topic. But once you start looking into short stories, whether they are genre short stories, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, or about any other topic in the world, the amount of craft, the level of craft that you need to write a story in a thousand words or in four pages and introduce characters and ideas, make the reader love those characters or hate them. And explore that idea in a most delightful fashion before the story comes to an end is a fantastic skill to have. As an example today, I brought along a book by Joe Hill, who happens to be the son of Stephen King, but he's becoming quite a good writer in his own way, also writing speculative fiction, I guess, not horror as much as his dad does, but this book is called Twentieth Century Ghosts, and it's a book of short stories. And some of them are a little bit of fantasy element in there, a bit of a horror element, but some of them are quite straightforward also, but they are marvelously written. And there's one in particular called Pop Art, which starts with the words, My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. And it's the most wondrous story about this young boy who befriends a new kid at school who is literally inflatable, basically a balloon that can talk and He keeps on floating off by accident and keeps on being bullied by other boys, and this boy befriends the inflatable boy, and they have some adventures together, and then a few interesting things happen to them down the line. And it's only a few pages long, but it is a masterful way of creating this, this little world with these two boys in one of whom is inflatable, and with this element of unexpected magic, I mean, you know, how can they be an inflatable boy? But you make such a silly concept into something really quite serious, and in the end, the story is actually really sad. So it's that kind of craft that I admire. So I think if I had to write a book, I would love to be able to write short stories.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [46:12]I'm going to answer that in two ways. First of all, as someone working in the media industry, in a newsroom, in a journalism environment, it's a real problem for us that there are young people coming into our newsrooms who don't read books unless they're really forced to at varsity or at school, perhaps. But in beyond that, they just don't read. And when you ask them, do you read anything? They say, yes, I read websites. And reading websites doesn't teach you anything about language or writing or taking in information. Your attention span Get shorter by the day. You skip when you read online. You don't actually take in as much information. That's been scientifically proven. That's why, you know, there's a case of a US college professor who, teaching something to do with technology, IT, I can't exactly remember, but he encouraged his students to use their laptops and iPads to take notes. And then quite recently, he reversed that decision and said he banned all technology from his classroom because he realized by not writing and reading in paper, people were taking in much less information. So certainly professionally, I would encourage people to keep on reading as much as they can. If you want to be a writer of any kind, or just if you want to have a good command of the language and spelling and the way that language flows, reading is the best way to learn that. And then personally, you should always read because it's amazing. I mean, it's the best way to create, to visit the most amazing worlds in your head and to read amazing thoughts by other people. It's a wonderful thing to be able to do.

Petro du Pisani, host · [47:45]It is. I mean, I asked the Google earlier today why people should read books, and I got four sort of answers which I think I can identify with as well. So firstly, reading fiction can help you to be more open-minded and creative. And it's exactly like you're saying, you can visit different worlds, different planets, and you can understand different viewpoints and perspectives, and you won't get that unless you read. And I think you should be reading books in particular. one of the studies by Yale researchers said that people who read live longer. They studied 3,635 people, older than 50, and found that those who read books for 30 minutes daily lived an average of 23 months longer than people who don't read at all or who read magazines. So I don't know what the statistic would be for people who read websites or online or that sort of thing, but you live longer. Maybe it's just because you want to see what's going to happen next. I don't know why that would be, but yes.

Petro du Pisani, host · [49:05]Another reason why it's good to read books is because if you set yourself a target of reading, say, fifty books in a year, it's something you can actually achieve. It's something that's achievable, and also it's time that's well spent. It's not a time looking at your cell phone or catching up on social media. It's actually a good way to spend your time recreationally is to read books.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [49:27]I have recently banned my cell phone from the bedroom precisely for that reason, because It's quite easy to, especially in the media industry, but I say it's true for everyone else also. You go to bed, your phone is next to you, you do one final check of your Facebook or your Instagram, and you get sucked into something, and next thing you know, you've been reading for half an hour trivialities on your phone instead of an actual good book. Same thing when you wake up. You wake up with your phone next to you, you get distracted by the overnight notifications that came in. Now I plug my phone into the, in the kitchen, it charges there overnight, and I go to bed, and I only have my book to read.

Petro du Pisani, host · [50:00]And I think that's a great way to spend your time. I mean, of all the stuff that you can learn in books, the best time to start anything new is right now. So imagine all of the stuff that you could learn and know one year from now if you read fifty books. Oh, it's amazing. All the new stuff that could be in your head, all constructive positive stuff. And then the last reason why I think people should read is that successful people are readers. So, because high achievers are keen on self-improvement. If you're not, don't want to learn new things and, and change yourself, then the best way to do that is to read and read books.