Tej is well read.

Tej Swatch works as a banker applying, in some small measure, his (major) economics and financial training. He applies his (minor) training in literature by reading as many books as he can and writing a lot of prose that he should really get around to showing people. You can (and probably should) follow his “vague, passive aggressive kvetching, incessant linking, and pithy remarks” @tejswatch.

What kind of a reader are you?
The only time I see the word “voracious” is when people answer a question like this or when someone well-read is described as a “voracious” reader. I would venture that I have never seen the word used to modify anything else. That’s odd, no?

Anyways, I am not a voracious reader, in that I don’t read nearly as much I probably should or could, and certainly not as much as people I know, or people I admire. My loose goal for a year is around 100 books. In the years I’ve been keeping tab, I’ve exceeded this number twice, have gotten close once, and fell well, well short the rest. But, compared to the average reader, I would say I am well-read and, thus, qualified for an entry on this blog. That’s the answer to the “ how many” implication of the question.

The “what,” I would like to think, is “anything,” but it’s not true. I think I read fairly widely, but I know that I have gigantic blindspots, and I recognize this simply has to be the case. There is a lot to read out there, the time to read it is very limited, and I commit to every book I start reading, so I have to cut out a lot, based on genre, author, subject, excerpt, and cover. One has to save time and be efficient.

Choosing a book, then, is more a function of getting the best bang for the buck. I choose books from several sources. Suggestions from friends are always a good measure, though fraught with peril. Taste is a fickle thing, and I have good friends who like really bad books. I like it when they recommend writers, so I can do some digging on my own, read about their writings and what others have said about them. I choose the writer’s best/most representative/well-known work, and go from there.

Another major source is book reviews. Not specific reviewers, publications or anything like that. Just whatever I come across, whatever gets put in front of me. I read reviews critically, and if I think it’s a good review, and it is positive, I usually think the book’s worth looking at.

The last is new and used bookstores. I wander the stacks, pick a volume here and there, and if I get a feeling – seriously, a feeling – I’ll buy it. Buying books isn’t so dangerous for me because, for some reason, I know if I own or don’t own a book. I’ll never buy a second copy. How I managed to develop this database is a mystery to me, but it’s there. I’ve never purchased a duplicate, and I have some 1,500 books.

Tell me about the last book you couldn’t put down.
Applying a strict measure, in that a book that I chose to read at the expense of essential tasks I should have been performing, I would have to say Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It was the second time I read the book, and I got so much more out of it than the first. It’s an incredible book, for the hard, brutal efficiency of its writing, for its tragic and cynical take on the essential nature of man, and for the sheer persuasiveness of its worldview. I felt something about me was revealed and laid bare to me, and that I had no choice but to acknowledge its Truth, and that Truth is horrific.

For fear that I have sounded corny, be advised, this is not a slight, ho-hum volume with some vague revelation about how we’re all a family, or anything similarly insipid and annoying. It is violent, depraved and sickening. The first time I tried to read it, I came across something so disturbing that I threw the book across the room (resulting in a break to its binding that flops the cover to this day). I gave up. The second time I started it, I felt compelled to pour a larger and larger glass of alcohol every time I settled in to read it.

Blood Meridian is all this and, for me, completely impossible to put down.

What makes you first pick up a book at a bookstore?
That’s tough. It’s hard to nail this down, because elements like “cover,” “binding,”  publisher,” “writer,” are probably equally distributed on the plane of what peaks my curiosity and compels me to pick up a book. Let’s cheat and say “a feeling,” knowing full well that this feeling comes from a wide array of things.

I just wander, and look at the stacks. When something catches my eye, I pick it up.

Has a book ever influenced the way you think about your life or the world?
My first answer to this question went on for pages. I’ve revised and answered it thus:

Absolutely! Surely this is the main reason a book resonates and stays with us. We can dismiss reading as entertainment, and a silly pastime if we like, but my fundamental worldview, my life, my way of thinking is shaped and, if I’m lucky, rocked by what I
read.

An example: a previous interviewee (and friend Laura Drake, who I urge to skip the next four paragraphs or so) went off, harshly, on a book that had settled something that had been a great source of angst for me. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which had prose that Drake found “ tortured and condescending” and “ torpid” was, for me, a revelation.

Without going into long and boring detail (and I am wary to reveal this), about a year before I read it, I went through a crisis about religion and its utility. All the big questions: Is there a God? What is His/Her/Its nature? Why is there evil? Exactly why is anyone (and, verily, why am I) religious? What purpose did it serve? Why believe? As an explanation, religion has little value. As a moral code, it has even less. So what’s the point?

I understand how one could read what I just wrote and dismiss it. Fair enough. But as someone who has grown up religious and visibly different because of his religion, such questions are not mild curiosities or charming little puzzles. They are grave matters tied up with all sorts of identity, guilt, shame, resentment, and anger. Let me assure you, I was troubled.

In the midst of this, I began Life of Pi. I will differ from my friend and say I was floored by the story and the writing. Utterly taken in, swept up, unable to believe how much I cared about what was going on. A boy, religious in three faiths, is shipwrecked and survives on his wits and his will. He still finds time to consider the beauty and horror of his world, and is able to love that which threatens him. All of this would have been a spectacular failure if Martel’s storytelling touch was not fine and enthralling. I was caught up. Even the strange and ultimately ill-advised interlude on a carnivorou island didn’t ruin it for me.

But what got me in the end (and what dissolved a lot of the troubles I was having) was the question Pi asks in the last chapter (“Which is the better story?”), and the reply he gives to the answer. My answer was the same as it was for one of the Japanese agents (the story with the animals).

To which, Pi replied: “Thank you. And so it goes with God.”

There. That did it.

The story is the thing. Whatever God is or isn’t, whatever religion is or is not, it is, in the end, a Story. And the Story can inspire charity, piety, grace, love, compassion, all that is so very good about us, in the face of all that is very bad about us. Religion is what we tell ourselves to help make us better than our nature.

I reconciled a lot of doubt and I let a lot of things go with just that little paragraph, at the end of that book. I was able to forgive so much of what was imposed on me, of what was expected of me. I recognize there is still much to consider when it comes to religion, but those issues, I find, are more social, economic and political, then existential. The point is, I found it easier to live with myself. As hokey and starry-eyed and precious as it may all sound, it changed my life.

Tell me about the worst book you’ve ever read.
That would have to be Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani. What a piece of insulting shit, made worse by the public cockstroke champagne-sipping intellectuals gave the writer when the book came out. What was sold as an authentic look about a minority group bubbling just under the surface of Greater London was actually a set of badly drawn, racist caricatures and stereotypes. I am probably angrier because it is a look at my culture. Perhaps, but it doesn’t make the book any less terrible. I’ll stop here and point to my review.

How do you get the books that you read?
I owe money to every library stupid enough to give me a card. This was a serious issue for me, because I heard a rumour that my university’s library withheld degrees until fines were paid up. Being a broke, just graduated student, I was terrified that the reward for my years of toil would be withheld for a mere $50 I owed for keeping some econometrics book for a semester. I honestly don’t remember how it was resolved, but I am pretty sure I was written off.

I begin with this to say, lately, I have begun to borrow books from the local city library system (the latest being David Foster Wallace’s excellent Everything and More: A Short History of ∞). I don’t owe much money (yet), but I am also discovering the joys of having access to this great resource. Surely this bodes well for us as a species. We collect giant repositories of information for anyone and everyone to use, either free or almost-free of charge, and place them in the most accessible places in our cities. What incredible collective enlightenment we demonstrate with this arrangement.

I began using the library for two reasons. The first is because of logistics. I’ve run out of room for my books. You can tell from the pictures that I’ve got my fair share. This lead to a very strict moratorium being placed on book purchases (only favourite writers, book club selections, and serious, debated-over must haves). If there is anything I need to read outside these criteria, I will have to borrow it somewhere (library, friend, etc).

The second is discipline. As wonderful and beautiful and comforting a wall of books is, it promotes laziness. I’ll read that book when I get to it, it’s not going anywhere. It’s right there. Borrowing a book from library stamps a reading deadline that must be met, or face the hardship of a nickel-a-day fine. I read it because I have to get it done.

Favourite bookstores? Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle; Audrey’s Books in Edmonton; Bibliophile Used Books, Carson’s Books in Vancouver; Sector 17 books in Chandhigarh, India.

Favourite libraries? Vancouver Public Libray’s main branch; Seattle’s main branch; The British Library (I know, I know, but I am sucker for their exhibit); Chicago’s main branch is magnificent; pretty much any main branch/university library.

What character or author would you like to call your friend?
I’ve never had a desire to befriend a character. Love and affection are certainly emotions one encounters when reading a book or about a character, but I wonder if this has more to do with the writing, the technique conjuring up feelings for what
does not exist. This doubt has prevented me from ever entertaining such impossible notions of having a friendship with a figment of imagination. This is not to say I doubt the emotion invoked by a character or a story. This emotion, I think, is the only meaningful truth we ever find in reading. But it is an internal calculus, a thing of our own brains and nerves. My friends are people, entities more complex, textured, entertaining and wonderfully imperfect than a bit of description and dialogue in a
book.

As for writers? Sure… I mean, who doesn’t want Carol Shields to be their friend after they read Unless or Happenstance or The Stone Diaries? I can’t believe that such meaningful, gentle prose would come from someone awful, and I have to believe that having a cup of tea with Carol Shields would be nothing less than… awesome. Of course, because she is no longer with us, I’ll never know.

Tej’s Must Reads
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.
Unless by Carol Shields
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
Palestine by Joe Sacco
The Big Short by Michael Lewis
What Is The What by Dave Eggers