“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
–Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Reading Quirks
The Wild Detectives & Laura Pacheco
Reading Quirks was originally published on The Wild
Detectives social media outlets. A comic strip was posted every
Wednesday for over 72 consecutive weeks from September 2016,
to January 2018.
For this edition, 14 of the original stories were discarded, and
replaced by 14 new and unpublished comic strips (pages 44-45,
47, 59, 61, 64-65, 67, 75-78 y 80-81).
All the original stories can be seen on:
The Wild Detectives
314 W Eighth St.
Dallas, TX 75208 (U.S.A.)
www.thewilddetectives.com
© The Wild Detectives, 2019
© Of this edition: The Wild Detectives
& Pepitas de calabaza ed.
Art Direction & Graphic Design: Andrés de la Casa-Huertas
Illustrations: Laura Pacheco
ISBN: 978-19-41920-89-3First edition, October, 2019
Pepitas de calabaza ed.
Apartado de correos nº 40
26080 Logroño (La Rioja, España)
www.pepitas.net
READING QUIRKS
A co-edition between The Wild Detectives (Dallas, TX) and Pepitas de Calabaza (Logroño, Spain)
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Wild Readers
by Ben Fountain
Reading Quirks is a work of nonfiction. You have in your hands an anthropological study of a strange and far-ran-ging human tribe, a tribe that gets from the reading of books the kind of happiness that other people derive from wrestling alligators. Everything in these pages is true; more than that, it is all scientifically true. We read in the tub, on the toilet, in the hospital emergency room, while showering or brushing our teeth, standing in line at the post office, waiting for the subway, the plane, the bus (“Oh, it’s raining?”), while walking the dog, riding a bike, swaying in a shady hammock. We agree with Borges, that heaven must be something like a library. We secretly dog-ear pages, and feel bad about ourselves afterwards. When we spot someone with a book, we’ll sprain our necks trying to get a glimpse of the cover. Our way of prepping for the apocalypse is to stockpile books, and surely the hardest part of packing for a trip is deciding which books to take, stalked as we are by the ever-present existential dread that someday, somewhere, we’ll find ourselves without anything to read. It’s not that we’re anti-social; far from it. It’s just that we often prefer to be silently social with the people on the page, who are, let’s face it, usually more interesting and entertaining than the flesh-and-blood versions.
Reading Quirks is particularly fine in exploring the olfac-tory dimension of our tribal culture. The crisp menthola-ted tang of a brand-new book makes it impossible to start reading without a good get-to-know-you sniff first. The potency of old books is even stronger, with their warm, yeasty smells of an after-hours bakery. This is the very odor of remembrance of things past, not unlike opening a tin of soda crackers manufactured during the reign of Edward VII. Reading Quirks is equally brave in tackling the great taboo, the dark side, if you will, of bibliomania. Borrowing books, lending books, one friend to another;
Ben Fountain is the author of collection of short stories Brief Encounters with Che Guevara(Ecco Press, 2006) and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco Press, 2012) –adapted in 2016 into a major motion picture, directed by Ang Lee. Last year he also published his essay on Trump’s 2016 campaign Beautiful Country Burn Again (Ecco Press, 2018). He has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fic-tion, and a Whiting Writers’ Award, among other honors and awards.
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nothing but pain and heartbreak ever came of it, not to mention the occasional assault. Better to do like that smart young woman on page 15 who buys all the copies of a favorite book to give to her friends, thereby saving herself the bother of murdering them when they don’t return her copy.
Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, Reading Quirks poses the question: Is there a place for our tribe in the modern world? A world in which the current leader of earth’s most powerful country hasn’t even read the books he’s supposed to have written. What does it mean to be a reader, to keep faith with the force of words, particularly words printed in ink on actual sheets of paper? “Why do you read?” asks the little girl on the very last page of this book. “I don’t know,” answers the man with a book in his hands. “The me-aning of life?” I won’t reveal the punch line, but one
wonders what constitutes meaning in our “post-truth” era of “alternative facts,” of information-delivery me-chanisms that are essentially click-and-swipe compul-sion machines? We, our tribe, are we mistaken to hold fast to that old-economy artifact, the book?
Books are no less fallible than any other medium, but they give us something precious that the almighty touch-screen does not. They give