The Hindsight is 20/20 Reader Tag!

[@tripp8833]

I got the high recently from Parades End. Magical!

[@mdavidmullins]

Ah my band of readerly brothers and sisters - what a get-together that would be, all gathered in one stadium, heads bowed, the flutter of thousands of pages furiously turning as we collectively forgot where we were. That runner's high, I especially felt it in the opening passage of _A Man in Full,_ a book recently mentioned here. Ditto Rushdie's _The Ground Beneath Her Feet._ _Midnight's Children_ pretty much throughout. Perhaps much to your chagrin, I sort of swam through _Les Misérables,_ very much feeling like I'd been drugged. I think Zadie Smith's _On Beauty_ is one of the more recent experiences I had of this.

[@GinaStanyerBooks]

What a fantastic tag, these questions are wonderful and I love your answers! This makes me want to start a book tube channel just so that I can answer these questions.

[@BookishTexan]

Thank you for the tag Steve.

[@DuncanMcCurdie]

This was perfect for a snowy Friday evening. I love how much you unabashedly love reading.

[@albertlevi2529]

You prolly dont care at all but does anyone know a method to log back into an Instagram account..? I was dumb lost my account password. I would love any tricks you can give me

[@ahmededwin3487]

@Albert Levi Instablaster :)

[@jordanparsons5703]

This was a great tag. Hearing you rhapsodize about reading is always a delight. The last book that gave me that unreplicable high you spoke of was John Crowley's "Little, Big."

[@angiejones5918]

I like the phrase 'omnivorous adventurous reader'. I read my first book at 12 years old, when Mr. Coles my English teacher, showed me how to slowly and steadily keep track of the words on the page. No one talked about dyslexia in the 70's. I think Mr. Coles knew how to help though, enough so I could read '101 Dalmatians' in a couple of days and I was thrilled to have finally read a whole book on my own. There was no stopping me after that, although my pace was more turtle than hare. E-readers have leveled the playing field. I'm now able to control the line spacing, number of words on the page and add a green tint on some devices. These days my reading feels 'normal'. I owe so much to Mr. Coles and I am grateful for Kindle.

[@thebookishbryants]

Thank you for tagging us, Steve. This was so good! We love hearing your back story about becoming a reader. We hope one day you do choose to publish some written work because you are one helluva storyteller with some wonderful experiences to draw on. Scott & Becky.

[@billruttenberg]

Thanks for doing the tag Steve! I was glad that you could have a short January truce. Great answers. Iowans are some of the greatest people on Earth. They will have a conversation with you and what is fun is when you realize someone you knew was a reader and you didn't know it before that moment. It opens up a whole new chapter in your conversations with them. You have no idea how funny some of the kids' google searches in their research are. They confuse information all the time and it is funny, so I am always having to point out how to differentiate the information they find. "They didn't have color photography in the 1800s." Have a great weekend.

[@cheryllovestoread]

My mom credits my very early reading to taking me grocery shopping and teaching me by sight the words like corn and beans and peas and bread on all the boxes and cans, etc. We repeated them all when putting them away at home. She also used the grocery store ads to reinforce them. I had story books of course, but she believes you can help all little ones begin reading by sight by using simple, informal and daily tasks, too. I still like to read food labels! 🤓

[@Yeg_kim]

This was fun, thanks Steve

[@jorgschumacher945]

Thank you for the video. This was one of your best. Your passion plucked my heartstrings and your anecdotes made me laugh out loud. Namesakes kann be a pain in the *, living with a formula 1 driver and allways be asked if you're related, and it seems to start all over again.

[@BooksForEric]

I got a huge reader's high a few weeks ago reading The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. Ditto somewhat recently for Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, To the Wedding by John Berger, The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, and much of the Checkerboard Trilogy by William Eastlake!

[@jamesholder13]

I really enjoyed this tag!

[@iuliabercescu6240]

Fantastic video! I completely agree with you on chasing the high, that’s mainly what keeps me reading. It also explains why, if I read too many underwhelming books in a row, I get cranky. I need that high again. Like an addict 😅

[@mdavidmullins]

It's numbers thing right? The more you read the better your odds of striking gold.

[@jobuckley2999]

I love people and good conversations but the finest conversations ever imaginable are in books.

[@tomlabooks3263]

“Stupidity is antithetical to faith”. Wonderful.

[@saintdonoghue]

I always feel a little sorry (OK, a lot sorry) for the 'minimal facts' school of Christians, people who somehow think it's compatible that a) God made them with the most powerful & complex brains in the history of life on Earth, but b) He doesn't want them to think more than the absolute minimum.

[@DDB168]

Eleni by Nicholas Gage gave me that high you talk about. Highly recommend it.

[@tyronebiggums8660]

Steve, I understand you are a big fan of presidential biographies. Have you read The Years of Lyndon Johnson?

[@mdavidmullins]

Uh-oh. "Have you read…" Methinks you're in for a mini-lecture. If you mean, Robert Caro, then I can answer that yes he has. He mentions them in previous video(s). Amazing books, by the way. I'm about to start the fourth. Let's hope that the fifth won't require a quite literal ghost writer.

[@scallydandlingaboutthebooks]

I'm off to research your career as a jockey.