When Books Could Change Your Life: Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do

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Big Books Feature

When Books Could Change Your Life

Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do

Emily Flake

Big Books Issue 2008

YA City Paper's Big Books Issue 2008 | By Bret McCabe

When Books Could Change Your Life Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do | By Tim Kreider

The Invisibles Young Adult Fiction Has Yet to Hear The Voices of Young, Urban, and Black Readers | By Michael Corbin

The Big Questions Science Fiction and Young Adult Fiction Share Themes and, Hopefully, Readers | By Adrienne Martini

See Spot Rejected Some Helpful Don'ts For Cracking Into Children's Publishing | By Brian Sendelbach

Teen Screams Dark Young Adult Fiction Captures Rudderless Horrors of Contemporary Adolescence | By Ian Grey

Little Golden Books It's difficult to imagine an American childhood without Little Golden Books--you know, the ubiquito... | By Michelle Gienow

Maurice Sendak Somehow I had always assumed that Maurice Sendak was French. Even as a child, I found Where the Wil... | By Lee Gardner

Nausicaa of The Valley of Wind In 2008, Spirited Away director Hayao Miyazaki probably needs little in the way of an introduction,... | By Jess Harvell

By Tim Kreider | Posted 9/24/2008

A girl I once caught reading Fahrenheit 451 over my shoulder on the subway confessed: "You know, I'm an English lit major, but I've never loved any books like the ones I loved when I was 12 years old." I fell slightly in love with her when she said that. It was so frank and uncool, and undeniably true.

Let's all admit it: We never got over those first loves. Listen to the difference in the voices of any groups of well-read, overeducated people discussing contemporary fiction, or the greatest books they've ever read, and the voices of those same people, only two drinks later, talking about the books they loved as kids. The Betsy Tacy Books! I loved those books! The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet! I can't believe you know that! The Little House on the Prairie books! Oh, my God--did you read The Long Winter? So good. Hey--does anyone else remember The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree?

It's not just that these books, unlike adult literature, have been left unsullied by professors turning them into objects of tedious study. We love these books, dearly and uncritically, the way we love the smell of our first girlfriend's perfume, no matter how cheap or tacky it might have been. Let's be honest: We all know that Ulysses and A la recherché du temps perdu are "better" books than The Velveteen Rabbit or The Little Prince, but come on--which would you take with you on a spaceship to salvage from the dying Earth?

Let me put it another way: When was the last time a book changed your life? I don't mean offered you new insights or ideas or moved you--I mean profoundly changed the way you see the world or shaped the kind of person you are? If you're like me, it's been longer than you'd like to admit. I recently read Eli Sagan's Cannibalism: Human Aggression Cultural Form, which enabled me to see capitalism as a highly sublimated form of aggression, on the same continuum as headhunting, warfare, and slavery, and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which gave me a greater equanimity about the esteem of others and assuaged my fear of death. But if I ever end up holed up in my parents' farmhouse holding off the bulldozers with a machine gun while listening to Beethoven's late quartets, it'll be because of the story "And the Moon Be Still as Bright" from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

About the last time in our lives when books have this kind of potent effect on us is in our early 20s, which not coincidentally tends to be the age of people you see poring over Nietzsche or that awful Ayn Rand. There's something alarming about this. I don't want to believe that our personalities ossify so much in adulthood that we're no longer capable of being changed by art. But part of the reason art loses its power over us, of course, is, simply and sadly, that we get old; our personalities, as soft, impressionable, and tempting as freshly poured sidewalk cement when young, gradually set and harden over the years with whatever graffiti passers-by scrawled there still indelibly inscribed in it. But when a 14-year-old gushes that the Twilight series are the best books she's ever read in her whole life, it's easy for grownups to forget that this is not necessarily hyperbole. At that age, we haven't heard any clichés, and even dumb ideas are new.

It's not that children's books are pure entertainment, innocent of any didactic goal--what grownups enviously call "Reading for Fun." On the contrary, the reading we do as children may be more serious than any reading we'll ever do again. Books for children and young people are unashamedly prescriptive: They're written, at least in part, to teach us what the world is like, how people are, and how we should behave--as my colleague Megan Kelso (The Squirrel Mother) puts it, "How to be a human being."

There is a level of moral instruction in these books underneath the incidentals of plot, character, and setting that we're constantly absorbing: How would a decent person act in this situation? What would a bad person do? What's the right thing to say to a friend when something terrible happens? The Lord of the Rings books are no more concerned with martial virtues such as loyalty and courage than they are with elaborate codes of courtesy and honorable conduct. Bridge to Terebithia makes this function of literature explicit when Leslie gives Jess The Chronicles of Narnia to read so that he can learn how a prince should behave.

"They're such moral books," Kelso says of the Little House series. "There's so much in them about how a good family should be, how communities help each other, the pioneer spirit, and the morality of the country." We're hardly even aware of this aspect of books when we're children because it's such a basic need; we're ravenous for this information. The exotic details of story and setting are like the sugary frosting on children's cereal; these lessons about life and the world are the real nutriment, the eight essential vitamins and minerals.

Of course, it's also in childhood that we're first exposed to some of life's big shocks and secrets--love and mortality. And the most terrible secret of all is the inevitable syllogism of these two: that the things we love will die. If we're lucky, the first loved ones we lose in this life are imaginary: Charlotte, Old Yeller, Old Dan and Little Ann (Where the Red Fern Grows), Flag (The Yearling), Aslan (though this is sort of a cheat since, like Jesus, he comes back right away), or Leslie Burke (Bridge to Terebithia).

"I think adults tend to forget about the fears of childhood," author Jenny Boylan (She's Not There and I'm Looking Through You) says via e-mail. "I was then and am now drawn to stories that paint a more complicated picture of childhood. Fern, in Charlotte's Web, is poised between childhood and adolescence--she starts off rescuing Wilbur from death (yes, that's right, DEATH WITH AN AX), and yet by story's end she kind of forgets about Wilbur--she and Henry are `off at the fair.' So to speak.

"At story's end, Wilbur's one friend--the wise, illuminating, literate spider--curls up and dies. Wilbur manages to save her egg sac, tends it all winter, and in the spring, the babies hatch out and--IMMEDIATELY LEAVE HIM. Except for a couple of them, who know nothing of Charlotte, and how she saved Wilbur's life. Charlotte's Web was the first book that made me weep, and I wept because I knew that it contained truth."

Sometimes we're not ready for the truths inside these books--they're trying to feed us ideas that are still bigger than our heads. A collection innocuously called The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense became an object of hysterical fear for me because it contained a chapter of translated Struwwelpeter, those grim German verses about ill-behaved children (they refuse to eat soup, they slam doors) who meet with what are presented as well-deserved, fitting deaths (starvation, getting clocked by a marble bust). These stories are products of the same German child-rearing tradition that produced grownups like Hitler. This chapter had to be paper-clipped shut in order to render the book safe for me. It wasn't the specter of transgression and punishment that was so terrifying to me--it was the casual, brutal fact of death.

Kelso evokes the quality of those children's books that takes on an almost numinous power. "It's magic," she says. "It contains some secret special knowledge for you, and it gives a book a vibe, like it almost scares you, but you keep going back to it again and again." She cites one book that did affect her in adulthood as deeply, and in the same way, as the books that fascinated and frightened her when she was a child: The Face of Battle, by John Keegan, a reconstruction of what several famous historic battles must have been like for the soldiers who fought in them. "I keep going back to it, like it has something to tell me," Kelso says. Like children's books, Keegan is telling her one of life's terrible secrets, a secret about Men and Death that's completely outside her experience as a woman who's lived her whole life in (relative) peacetime.

Even as fully grown adults we remain secretly starved for guidance and instruction. Many of us are walking around with the uneasy feeling that we missed the first day of class and wondering if there are CliffNotes. Most people desperately want someone to tell them what life's about, what people are for, what we're supposed to do--how to be a human being. But serious literature, at least since the 19th-century, has been disdainful of fulfilling any didactic obligation. Sorry, kids, that isn't what art is for.

There is a kind of no man's land in the literary landscape that can't be called "children's" or "young adult"--it's recognized as serious literature, if a little patronizingly, by the adult world--but which has a specific and perennial appeal to adolescents. I'm thinking here of writers such as J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., those staples of the college dorm. We reserve a special reverence for these authors that is qualitatively different from the respect, even awe, we feel for undeniably great writers like Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy--it's less rational or open to critical discussion. The reaction to revelations of the usual mundane human failings in recent biographies of figures beloved from childhood, such as Ray Bradbury or Charles Schulz, has been not just the surprise or sad worldly shrug we might expect but hostility and denial--a sense that we ought not to have been told such things, as if we'd been told once more that Santa Claus wasn't real or Shoeless Joe threw the series. And Joyce Maynard and Margaret Salinger's troubling memoirs about Salinger--we didn't want to know. Salinger and Vonnegut both give voice to the adolescent passion for justice, their dogmatic, almost fanatical, fairness and decency, and their blooming disgust at the epiphany that the world adults are foisting on them is neither fair nor decent.

Meanwhile, books that unabashedly purport to supply all the answers sell like Hula-Hoops or Viagra. This genre is called "wisdom literature" if it's old enough to be respectable or "self-help" if it's by someone who's still alive and making money off it, and ranges in credibility and earnestness of intention from the Tao te Ching and Aurelius' Meditations to shameless dogshit like The Secret. "Religious" comprises its own category on publishers' best-seller lists, so mammoth and lucrative is this market.

I would suggest that the vast popularity of this genre is because it is effectively children's literature for adults. They address us directly, confidentially, allegedly explaining everything and advising us how to comport ourselves correctly. Even cynical hoaxes (or, to give them the benefit of a doubt, artifacts of clinical delusion) such as The Celestine Prophecy, The Da Vinci Code, and The Shack partake of--or exploit--that same thrill of being let in on a secret, the shiver of magic you remember from the first time you walked farther back in the old wardrobe than the wardrobe went and felt the furs turn to firs against your cheek, or glimpsed an old Victorian house in the fog where none had been the day before, or saw an unearthly glow over the hill out in the old apple orchard. Titles such as The Secret, The Rules, and The Game pretty much say it all: Someone's finally going to initiate us into the select society of Those in the Know, for only $23.95 retail.

These books also frequently appeal to some authority higher than that of mere fellow human beings: the ancients, beneficent aliens, or good old God. (This is how sacred texts always establish their authority: Hey, I didn't make this stuff up; I just wrote it down.) When we're children, all the books we read are handed down to us, like the Ten Commandments, by grownups, who seem like, and sort of are, a different order of being from ourselves. They're the gods of childhood, bigger and older and more experienced; they know more than we do, imparting what wisdom to us they think we can bear, empowered to tell us what to do. I'm over 40 now, no longer by even the most charitable definition a young adult, and I'm starting to realize, in something like panic, that I don't understand anything, and that nobody else seems to know any more about it than I do. There aren't any grownups. And maybe there aren't any secrets left to tell.

Big Books Feature archives

More from Tim Kreider

David Foster Wallace: 1962-2008 (9/24/2008)

The Frightener (9/26/2007)
William Sloane's Two Novels Cut Right Through Genre And Burrow Into a Dark, Uncanny Unknown

The Un-Speakable (9/27/2006)
Exploring the Work of Splatterspunk Author Edward Lee

Roo

1 comments.

Member since 9/24/2008

Wow.

It's very strange to see my own thoughts and feelings mirrored so closely on what amounts to a random weblog. Thank you for being so much more eloquent than I ever could in saying these things.

Posted 9.24.2008 2:33 PM

marlinmac

1 comments.

Member since 9/24/2008

Wonderful!

Posted 9.24.2008 2:39 PM

Maulie

3 comments.

Member since 9/24/2008

So very true- I can remember a few times:

My first ever "big girl" novel, and the first adult novel I ever read was Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. I asked my 6th grade teacher if she had ever read it and was greeted by a look of sheer horror. Oh, and no, I've never killed anyone, I grew up just fine, thank you. She IS a fluff novelist, but sometimes you have to start fluffy.

When I finished Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I'm not giving anything away, no way would I do that to you. I will admit that after I read the 'twist', I didn't finish, I started over.

Stumbling upon a coverless, non-descript novel at a garage sale. I opened it to anywhere, discovered it was a dystopia, and asked the lady if I could have it. years later, This Perfect Day by Ira Levin is STILL my favorite novel of all time, and introduced me to the world of dystopia.. which leads me to

Handmaid's Tale: The most incredible job I ever has was working at a used bookstore in New Mexico. I met 'Odinsgirl' we'll call her, who showed me a whole world of everything I was missing. When she learned what a dystopic fan I was, and that I had never read that Margret Atwood novel, it became an assignment. It grabbed me, shook me, and scared the living sheet out of me.

I've tried so hard to recreate this, but it seems like everything you read now is a rehash of everything else you've always read.

And finally, listed this last because I do not remember the name of the book or the author. It was about a girl, she finds out her mother has cancer, who [spoiler] dies on Christmas day. It's about how she deals with it, and how she looks back to remember everything. There were stories about hanging out on a rooftop, making really cool sandwiches, and her mom showing up to watch her production, even though she was in a wheelchair. If you can help me with either the novel name or the author, I will forever love you.

Posted 9.24.2008 3:21 PM

Maulie

3 comments.

Member since 9/24/2008

Wow, sorry for the WoT: no carriage returns for the loss!

Posted 9.24.2008 3:37 PM

kafromet

1 comments.

Member since 9/24/2008

Maulie I think the book you are looking for is "You Shouldn't Have to Say Goodbye."

http://www.amazon.com/You-Shouldnt-Have-Say-Good-Bye/dp/0590431749

:) My Search-fu is strong.

Posted 9.24.2008 3:54 PM

karen2h

1 comments.

Member since 9/24/2008

I read "you should'nt have to say goodbye" too, as a teeny tiny teenager. And those were Reuben sandwiches, btw. ;)

Posted 9.24.2008 5:37 PM

Thurzday

1 comments.

Member since 9/24/2008

Fantastic article. No matter what books my teachers told me to read and analyze, I always turned back to Roald Dahl's "Witches." I don't even know why, but that's not important. What's important was that it influenced my life, regardless of how, and helped me get through rough times as a child.

And yeah, yeah, my taste matured slightly as I grew older. But even now I find myself drawn to the teenage section of the library to see if they have anything new.... I can't resist.

Well anyway, thank you for posting this great article... it made me feel better about my minor obsession with children's books. =)

Posted 9.24.2008 7:32 PM

Wraven0315

1 comments.

Member since 9/24/2008

These are powerful, profound ideas. This article made me remember how I felt when I was a clumsy nine-year-old stumbling though _Charlotte's Web_ for the first time. I fell in love then, just as I did when I was an even clumsier twelve-year-old who discovered the joys and horrors in the world of Stephen King's dark imagination. It seems to me, having read this article, that my two reactions to very different literature are really reactions to the same kind of thing. Perhaps this need for an explanation, a reason for the world to be the way it is and people to be the way they are, is exactly the thing that brings us back to genres such as horror (the psychological, not necessarily the blood and gore) over and over again.

But then again, we all read different types of literature for different reasons. After all, the bookstores arrange texts in these seemingly concrete categories for a reason. People gravitate toward the same kinds of literature because it serves a particular purpose for them, whether they realize it or not. The types of literature we choose, then, says more about what we need and want as people than it does the literature itself. After all, most children are engaged in the same task: growing up as unscathed as possible. As adults, though, our paths diverge into a myriad of different purposes and styles. While some are searching for an assurance that life really can work out perfectly and happily, others are looking for an affirmation that nobody's life is really as beautiful as television, commercials, and magazines lead us to believe life can be.

So, if we read as children to get ideas about the difficult questions that are invariably posed to children such as how one should behave or handle a difficult situation, we read as adults to reaffirm that the ideas we formed while reading _Charlotte's Web_ and _Blubber_ are the right ideas.

Posted 9.24.2008 8:29 PM

Maulie

3 comments.

Member since 9/24/2008

That was it, thank you very much!

Posted 9.26.2008 1:56 AM

cessy

1 comments.

Member since 9/28/2008

At the age of eight I was awarded a book for making progress at school. It was 'The Little White Horse.' I read this book over and over many a time, and it has always been one of my favourites. My 47th birthday was last month and my partner bought me a collector's edition of this book and I am in the process of reliving my childhood. A movie is being made of it too. I read each day. Books are my addiction.

Posted 9.28.2008 6:06 PM

Grumpus

1 comments.

Member since 9/28/2008

Brilliant article and the first useful thing "Stumble Upon" has shown me :-)

I have a scrappy handful of well-loved oldies I read over my morning cereal every day at 6 am: some L.M. Montgomery stuff, Roald Dahl, Lois Lowry, old "Dandy" and "Beezer" comics my dad would send from Ireland...dog-eared stuff that is propped incongruously in with my respectable adult tomes. But they offer a good dose of reality before I zip into my clever adult disguise and go off to work.

And the last 3 or so pages of C.S. Lewis's "the Last Battle" will always be the most potent bit of fiction I will ever, ever read.

Posted 9.28.2008 9:14 PM

kalhendr

1 comments.

Member since 9/30/2008

Wow. Thank you for this article.

I am in college (a senior, wow) and I am desperately seeking THE book, the one that will tell me where to go from here.

(I still haven't found it.)

Posted 9.30.2008 11:27 PM

MaggieM

1 comments.

Member since 10/7/2008

Maulie! You're the first person I've seen who's even heard of "This Perfect Day" - I found it when I was about 12 and the impact it had was enormous. It made a complete bookworm fascinated by science (and therefore it's fiction).

I'd have to say that the first book I read that made me realize that there was "more than meets the eye" so to speak was called "Ceremony of the Innocent," on the surface a little fluff piece concerning the at times cloyingly innocent Ellen and her cynical statesman husband, but in truth the story of America losing her innocence and naivete to greed leading to the eventual fall of the stock market and death of Ellen herself. It was with that novel that I began to learn how adults are merely children with more power to do harm, and as little self control with it when they have such power. Maybe a negative lesson but one that has to be understood.

Posted 10.7.2008 8:22 AM

Jadei

1 comments.

Member since 10/20/2008

@ cessy: I read the Little White Horse in elementary school, and I loved it. Then, the school cleaned out its shelves, and I never saw it again. I actually cried. I've been meaning to buy it online.

The books about animals by Thornton W. Burgess are also childhood favorites, and the Redwall series is another nostalgic one for me, especially Marlfox.

Posted 10.20.2008 7:51 PM

DV

1 comments.

Member since 10/22/2008

I can't even remember when I last read a full article on the internet. I read this one though.. Thank you, it really gave food for thoughts.

Posted 10.22.2008 7:29 PM

iamduncan

1 comments.

Member since 11/6/2008

On a personal level, I completely disagree with this article.

I can't and shan't speak for others, but none of this rang true for me.

As a child I loathed fiction, and as an adult I loathe it more.

I don't walk about as an adult thinking I "missed the first day of class", or secretly wishing someone would turn the lights on and tell me what it's all about.

For me, there is no mystery to life, to people, there is no magic, and there has never been any.

I love reading, but for me, it is a part of the process of learning, and nothing more.

Posted 11.6.2008 9:49 AM

anonyjulia

1 comments.

Member since 11/19/2008

I am sad for you, iamduncan.

Posted 11.19.2008 11:41 PM

Courtni

1 comments.

Member since 9/6/2009

My first tears shed from grief over death were when I lost Old Dan and Little Ann in "Where the Red Fern Grows" sitting on a school bus when I was nine.

The two books I read that made me open my eyes were "The Giver" by Lois Lowry and "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury. I first read them when I was 14 years old. From the first time I read them, I saw the world in a completely different light. They changed my way of thinking completely and for the better. I look at some things and find myself immediately relating them to the concepts of these books. I find myself talking about what they have taught me to close friends.

At 20, I first read "The Little Prince" and I wish so bad that I would have read it at a younger age. It moved me in a way that words cannot explain, but it would have done me far greater if I discovered it earlier.

Books are my passion. I am working to become a teacher for the sole purpose of sharing these books with kids before it is too late.

Posted 9.6.2009 1:36 AM

CarolD

Guest

I too Stumbled Upon this article today.

You have so accurately described The Quest of my adulthood, the search for a story that will live on in my mind like those of my childhood. You have defined why I can still relate stories I read as a child, but can't really tell you what I read last week. (Well, maybe a little of that is being 44!) Perhaps you have freed me from the constant disappointment that the end of most novels bring. They cannot live up to the expectations because I am different.

But, I am prompted to comment for this reason: Are you kidding me?! THE WONDERFUL FLIGHT TO THE MUSHROOM PLANET? I LOVED that book and yet had somehow completely forgotten about it. I grew up in a house that owned few books, but my mom would take me to the library anytime I wanted. One of the few books I had was an ancient, falling-apart copy of the Mushroom Planet that I read and reread. For years I thought of it anytime I boiled eggs. Whatever happened to it, I wonder? It is not in my library. I think I will be calling my mother today to see if she just might still have it...

Posted 11.28.2009 9:40 AM

bekkarinaaa

Guest

What a fantastic article. These are my views about reading fiction, yet they have been expressed in a much better way that I could ever dream of. If only I could have constructed this article for my English finals. Literature has always been a love of mine whether it be Roald Dahl when I was 7 years old, Jane Austen in my teens or Tolstoy later in life.

No matter the genre of fiction, fiction can serve to highlight unfamiliar aspects of the world to readers, thus enhancing the knowledge of readers all around. Personally, i believe reading fiction is just as good a medium for learning as attending school. An avid reader who does not attend school regularly is still (in most cases) as intelligent as his/her peers..

Posted 12.8.2009 2:56 AM

Mackenzie

Guest

Some life changing books that I have read are The Neverending Story and HIs Dark Materials

Posted 12.13.2009 5:16 PM

Luna

Guest

"that awful Ayn Rand"

wtf??????????

Posted 12.21.2009 8:33 PM

Lezned

Guest

I read so very many books in elementary school - but it was QUENTIN REYNOLD's book THE WRIGHT BROTHERS that I read over and over and over... and there were the HENRY HUGGINS BOOKS and the HOMER PRICE books - and all sorts of biographies. In jr. high I had no favorites - senior high not so much either. It was college where I found the author that absolutely formed the rest of me - John Steinbeck with Grapes of Wrath, Pastures of Heaven and most stellarly, East of Eden. They all get a read every other year or so, and I'm fifty six years old now. Reading makes an impact? Oh, you bet.

Posted 12.29.2009 9:45 AM

Aminor7

Guest

That awful Ayn Rand? What's so awful about her? Live for yourself, there's no one else worth living for. Beautiful message, and I resent the recent criticism directed towards her ideas when the real source of repulsion is the voice of those who would use her idea to uphold immoral selfishness.

What good in this world ever came from someone waiting for a handout? Whether it be welfare mother or another corporate bailout, it is a burden on those of us who have our s**t together.

Posted 12.29.2009 9:13 PM

Brydieee

Guest

Harry Potter. It changed my life and also taught me valuable lessons. I know that there are other books out there that are way better than HP, but for me personally no book can ever compare to it.

Posted 12.29.2009 9:52 PM

fleakfragfry

Guest

I only very recently read On the Road by Kerouac (unedited scroll), and, at 22, it was the perfect time to do it. I read it in two days, and I giggled and teared the whole way through. I know he's generally considered overrated amongst literary types, but to me that misses the point. With Kerouac, and On the Road specifically, you have to like Jack. You have to get to know him, let him show you that way of life and that way of looking at the world. It's just like as a child, when you absolutely love a character, and you wish so much that you knew them, or could even be them. It did to me what Tolkien and Stephen King did to me when I was younger. I got that rising heat in my chest, that conflict between the excitement to finish, and the hope that it'll never end. I know Kerouac was reckless and immature, and that his way of life killed him only a decade or so after the writing of his seminal work, but much like many characters who look dingy in the wiser light of adulthood, I can't possibly care when I'm wrapped in his story. I drank pints and pints of whiskey and hopped a flatbed truck across this great big country. I chilled and wrote with Ginsberg and friends, stole cars, and went mad with fever in Mexico. And even though I knew I was reading the work of a confused man, I felt I was learning some secret, but a more terrifying one than even those I had learned as a child.

I think what I learned is that sometimes it's worth it to pay for immediacy and joy with the seeds of one's own longevity. To fuel the here and now with a bit of your tomorrow, because tomorrow you may die anyway. You live your whole life as a child afraid. Everything is bigger than you. Everything can kill you, you think, and as you've pointed out, we learn through stories (or sadly, life itself) that no one can really protect you from death. And that's where the capacity for total escape comes from. That overwhelming fear and need. I think as adults, we hide behind callouses and shields, hoping that numbness will make the fear go away, or perhaps even convinced that it has gone. And I think the key to retaining that childlike enthrallment is to explore your fears, expose yourself as weak and vulnerable, perhaps even more so now, when all the little comforts that once held you are shown to be false idols.

Or maybe it's simply my early 20's talking. I don't claim to know anything for sure, and I am young yet. But I hope that I can retain that ability to immerse myself, and I certainly have a better hold on it than most of my (sane) peers. If I ever do unlock some secret to eternal inner youth, perhaps I'll write a book about it. But more than likely, if I ever do write one, it'll be about the joys of not knowing anything for sure, floating in a mess of confused ebb and flow like a cork on the ocean. Or like a budding child.

Posted 1.5.2010 12:51 AM

fleakfragfry

Guest

Oh, and Aminor7, I would reserve such extreme judgments if I were you. It's never a good idea to cast stones, and I doubt you're innocent of taking handouts yourself. Most people who feel the way you do have had the luxury to do so. I bet you took from the open offering hands of your parents growing up. Some people weren't so lucky, and had to find other ways to stay fed. Humanity has had a pretty long run, and over the course of thousands of years, we've tended to value the charitable over the miserly. Not always, but generally. I would think that, rather than consider yourself above or beyond all the wisdom collected heretofore, it may be a good idea to give some merit to the whole of the collective human consciousness. And if not, at least pick a different handle. Am7 is a chord reserved for the downtrodden. Stick to something trite and major, and leave the blues alone if you aren't going to bother to learn something from it.

As for Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged is most definitely backwards. Someone will always step up to be the leading elite, but who will scrub your toilet for a few bucks a day without a proletariat class? "Let them eat cake" leads to revolution.

Posted 1.5.2010 1:21 AM

elyzah

Guest

fleak, i have just one thing to say to you:

word.

Posted 1.5.2010 6:21 AM

Kosofsky Baker

Guest

Nice article... I do take issue with one thing, though, which is your remark about Hitler when discussing "Struwwelpeter". Hitler wasn't German, he was Austrian, so how could a German child-rearing tradition produce him? Not to say that the way he was brought had no influence on him, I'm sure it did, but it wasn't an entire tradition of another country. Why is it that everything German has to be brought back to Hitler? It's really unnecessary and really doesn't help.

Posted 1.7.2010 7:50 AM

frenchlit

Guest

it's funny, a la recherche du temps perdu discusses this very phenomenon

Posted 1.8.2010 2:32 AM

RachelB

Guest

This is such a beautiful article. Books taught me about life... moreso than my parents, my friends, or my teachers... because they opened worlds that seemed otherwise inaccessible to me. Judy Blume taught me about becoming a woman out of a girl. E.B. White taught me the value of friendship and loss. C.S. Lewis and F.H. Burnett taught me magic exists everywhere, it just takes a bit of looking. Roald Dahl proved to me that children are just as powerful -- if not moreso -- than adults. Harper Lee revealed the dangers of sex.

I'd do anything to read "Are You There God? It's Me Margaret" or the Harry Potter books like I did the very first time.

Thank you for your words. It's great to know so many people can relate.

Posted 1.12.2010 12:38 PM

ash817

Guest

Thank you so much for writing this amazing article. You have summed up my whole life as a children's librarian.

There are so many books that I read as a child. I loved the feeling of being so conusmed by a book that the world stopped. Each time I pick up a "classic" I am instantaneously transported back to a time of comfort and hope. I think that is the miracle of reading!

Sometimes I feel like crying for the children of today. They are so consumed with technology that they loose the connection and the magic. I wish I could walk up and unplug them from all the sound bites of this world and let them explore the world through their own lenses. I started a book club at work, but children seem to be too consumed by sports, tv, and studing for standardized test that they cannot manage to read a book a month.

The greatest part about a book is if I don't like it I can just put it back up on the library shelf. If only life was that easy. We all look for answers in the pages of the books...

Thank you for your words. I am sure I will re-read them when I need a little bit more encouragement.

Posted 1.17.2010 5:13 PM

Reading Countess

Guest

I whole-heartedly agree! As a fifth grade reading teacher, our term for this is "touchstone book." The book(s) that changes us, makes us who we are as a reader begins at this very impressionable age. You would be surprised by the wonderful books that have resonnated with my kids. The middle grade books of today are much different than the books from my own schooling. Many of them deal with very adult topics (divorce, homelessness, social injustice, child abuse, alcohalism...) and teach important lessons to children within the safe confines of a book. It is most often these books that my kids cite as their touchstone books. Ash817's comment about children being consumed with technology and not managing to read a book a month is simply not the case in many classrooms. Our instruction in reading is shifting through reading workshop. Last year, my students in all four blocks read an average of 41 books (and that was just in the 9 months that I had them). I wonder how many ADULTS read that many books?

Wonderful post-as seen by the amount of comments you have. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Posted 1.24.2010 10:11 PM