Blazing Reader,

From a young age, I was a trekkie. I saw every episode of the original Star Trek series with Captain Kirk.

Then in grade five, this new version of the show hit the screen. I didn’t like it. Kirk had been replaced by some old bald British guy with a French name on an aerodynamic spaceship with wall-to-wall carpeting. I refused to watch it.

A year later, a friend told me the show had improved. The first officer had grown a beard. And they’d got rid of the pretty red-headed doctor but kept her annoying son. I shrugged my shoulders and gave it a try. And I was hooked. For a while...

Truth be told, Patrick Stewart and Jean-Luc Picard are the reason I never made it past season five. Their contagious love of reading set me on a course away from the screen and to the pages of books. There was one interview I read in some Star Trek magazine that had made a particular impact on my teenage mind. I can’t track it down, but here’s a similar quote from an interview Stewart did with The Washington Post:

“I began reading seriously when I was about six. We had no television, no record player. All we had was the radio, and that was BBC. Nothing else. So books became my source of entertainment, and when I was about seven, I found the local library. And they were so generous to me and kind and showed me where the children’s section was. Well, I would go there and get our books, and then after a while, I wandered around the library. And I found the adult section, and that changed my life again because I began looking at much older books and books that I’d never heard of. And one of my passions became 20th-century American literature.

“But, so I’ve read — my day, every single day, no matter how early I have to get up, I begin with a cup of tea and a book. Not a script, not emails, a book. And it’s my book, my time, and I spoil myself with twenty minutes to half an hour of reading.”

So, I have Sir Patrick Stewart to thank for the three shelves of books I own (half of which I’ve actually read). And, who knows, if it wasn’t for him, I might never have written any of my novels.

May he rest in peace.

John C.A. Manley

P.S. For more on my growing collection of books: Returning to Canada with a heavy heart and suitcases full of heavy books

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.