(Here's the text of a piece I wrote for the booklet for the BSTAI event I mentioned in the last post. Fun times.)

What choices will you make to live the best life you can? The next few years for you will revolve around answering this question. Beware: People might dress it up in fancy phrases like ‘maximising your potential’ or something like that. Ignore them. You’re smart enough to know you’re probably being sold something.

There’s no doubt you have to make a series of choices, and these choices will help determine the course of your life. So those choices are important.

There’s just one problem: you’ve never really had to make serious choices before. In fact, you live and work within institutions that deprive you of choice on a daily basis. Your day is programmed for you, as are many of your nights. Your food is handed to you. Much of the time, you have to ask to leave the room, to use the bathroom, even to speak to answer questions.

So how, exactly, are you supposed to make choices to live the best life when you need a superior’s permission just to urinate?

The answer is: read books. Great books. Books that have expanded minds for generations and changed the outlook for those who have read them. Read the books on ipads or kindles or laptops or even on paper. The ideas matter more than the medium, and they are some of the best ideas humans have ever produced.

It’s important to read something that hasn’t been prescribed for you by someone else. It has to come from you.

You won’t be able to expand your mind sufficiently in school. That’s not what it is there for. Your teachers and your parents do amazing work, and the love and effort they put into you shows in your presence at this event. You are someone special because of the work your parents and teachers did for you. But they are not you. They don’t have to make the choice. You do. It’s your life. You’re the one who has to answer the question: What choices will you make to live the best life you can?

Books exist outside the mainstream, both of your experience and that of your parents and teachers. When you read a book you are engaging with someone’s thoughts in a totally new way. The way I read Kerouac’s On the Road will be completely different to the way you read it. But like the teenaged me, all those years ago, you will see the world differently because of reading that book.

You know you’ve read a great book when days, weeks, and even years after reading it, you are still thinking about what you read. Great books change you, and they stay with you through your life.

Great books allow you to see outside yourself, to imagine different ways of living. Which is why they are perfect for trying to expand your mind to think about the kind of life you’d like to live in the future.

Read Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Huxley’s Brave New World, Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Hemmingway’s Farewell to Arms, Capote’s In Cold Blood, Puzo’s The Godfather, and anything by John Fowles, especially The Magus and The Collector.  Read Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. Read Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life. It’s 2000 years old and every word is relevant to the life you’ll have to live in the 21st Century.

Or read none of these, and go get your own. You’re the boss, it’s your life and your headspace. Don’t read ‘young adult’ books. They are fine but for my purpose that’s like eating a bag of chips at Donkey Forde’s when what I want for you is the finest filet of human thought. I want you to read the best books humans have ever written.

But don’t read Joyce’s Ulysses. It’ll just wreck your head. Leave that until college.

Start randomly. Go to the library, or online, choose a book, and dig into it. Ask yourself about the slice of life you’re reading about. What is it that appeals to you about these people’s lives? What disgusts you? What are you, for sure, dying to try? What will you never, ever countenance?

Those impressions are key. Let them sit with you for a while.

I guarantee the great books will help you choose better, by offering you a glimpse of a life outside your current conception. The great books are yours, and they are waiting for you. Go read them and make better choices. Your futures are so bright, I envy you.