When I was but knee-high to a grasshopper, Dad would often pop his head into whatever bubble I was in at the time and spin a battered and yellowing paperback onto my lap.
“Here, read that. You’ll like it,” he would say.
Then he’d wander off to build a homeless shelter or a school or a choir or whatever else he was crafting for the world at the time.
It wasn’t until many years later that I realize that he was crafting me too.
Those books prepared me for things I would encounter later in life that there are no lessons for; love, drugs, adventure, luck, betrayal, and death.
Those ageing and comically-fronted tomes of pulp fiction changed the way I thought about the world.
They opened my eyes to the possibilities and the madness and the complex, crushing beauty of it all.
And I wouldn’t be me without them.