He had alw
ays felt that books created a force field around him […] he had never had to travel, his conversations with books had been sufficient. Until finally he prized them more highly than people. They were less threatening. ~ The Little Paris Bookshop
Or
Put your faith in books
That’ll protect you
Put your faith in books
And a mind of your own
Neither charm nor looks, will make them respect you
You must learn to stand
You must learn to stand alone
~ Fame, the musical
Amras asked me yesterday how it was that I could have four or five books on the go at once.
“Why would you do that to yourself?”
Now he’s gone and got me thinking…why must he always do that?
An interesting question really; I’ve never really thought of it that way before. As far as how I keep the stories I’m following straight – I don’t know, I just do. I can pick up a book and flip to almost exactly where I left off, with only a few exceptions (Robert Jordon is one of those; he requires a full 12 book re-read and I haven’t had the time). As to why…well…
I guess that has to do with who I used to be, before I became who I am…
My mother taught me to read before I can remember such a thing as being taught. There were just always books in the house, always books for Christmas, for birthdays, for any occasion. I compare myself as a child to Sara Crew in A Little Princess, which was – and still is – my favourite book to be read aloud from. Even now, as an adult, I would treasure being read to. I have only flickering memories of being read ‘real’ children’s books, you know the See Spot, see spot run kind of thing. That didn’t last long. Mum read me real stuff, Treasure Island and The Secret Garden and countless others that I lost track of. I fell asleep to the Oz stories and Kipling’s How the Elephant Got His Skin.
Growing up I didn’t have any friends, the one child on my block despised me and I despised her equally. I wasn’t cool enough to have friends in school, and I wasn’t weird enough to be ‘automatically’ cool…and there was just me. Just me and a big house and two parents and two dogs; and a Grandma who – while she loved me very much – didn’t have much in the way of entertaining a kid; it wasn’t that I wasn’t a nice child, I like to think I was, but I’ve always had that bit of a snobbish tendency and I’ve never let anyone in easily – so I wasn’t well liked. As a teenager I was a diva – a total diva – while at the same time being painfully shy so the only thing I was a diva about was my voice, which was the freak voice that the teachers loved and the other students hated because the teachers loved it and I was a bitch about it…so…again, not really all that well liked. Not avoided exactly just…not liked.
So, since I wasn’t big on making other people see the world as I saw it, and since I seemed to see it differently, and since I wasn’t really big on caring what other people thought as a child…I …ran away.
Books have long been my closest friends. They don’t lie, they don’t cheat, they don’t expect anything from me, they don’t let me down, they don’t trick me or pretend to be anything other than what they are, they don’t hurt me or disappoint me, they are safe. And they’re gateways, I can fall into them, fall through them. I can go to modern day Paris, to Middle Earth or to London in the horrifying stretch of 1888. I can be Alice and fall into Wonderland. I can ride magic carpets, or gain fortunes in diamond mines. I can shadow Catherine as she yearns after Heathcliffe on the moors (Heathcliffe is an ass by the way, I don’t know why Catherine likes him). I can throw myself into a river and learn how to breathe under water. I can see it, all of it, sometimes so vividly that when I lift my eyes from the page I find myself started to still be where I started.
So why would I pick just one? If you could go anywhere, savor everything, taste everything, sample the entire smorgasbord of the universe, would you just go straight for the one you knew? The one that was easy? The one that was safe? Or would you take everything? Pick a door any door, a world through each one, a friend behind each cover…a safe haven in every page. Like diving into a pool in the wood between the worlds, that divides us from Narnia and Charne, and every other world ever written…or in any kind of existence.
Just one? Why would I pick just one?
We are our stories, stories that are not read do not live, and every story deserves to live and be lived.