"You enter. The smell of books invites you in, both musty and new. Newspaper and magazines rustle softly in one direction-- a dull little place that your father makes a beeline for. You inform him that you're going to look at the children books or the comics, unconscious of the lie you tell. Because now you're in a bookstore and all you see is row after row of stories; of possibilities and impossibilities and friends and ideas and places and dreams and adventures, and you don't know if you'll be able to stay in the same section for longer than a minute."
- Nuri Talib -
iThink that Courage is a child because it is only as children that we understand the sheer terror of knowing how much we do not know. How did we do it? How did we dare to dive into the pages of a tale that had as much a chance of disturbing the mind as it did of charming it?
We can't flatter ourselves as such in adulthood. We read reviews and 'test' the first few pages of an alluring little novel. Or we ask for a recommendation and wait for the shortlist of someoranother prize to be released. We avoid the genres that unnerve us and the ones we suspect may bore us. We dip our toes into the pool, afraid to make that frantic dash-- that heart pounding leap, that glorious splash. Jane Eyre is boring before we have met her, The Shining is scary before we have felt it.
There is nothing quite like reading a book as a child. iCan tell because The Famous Five are our friends but Othello, Hamlet, Ian Malcolm, Sethe-- they are protagonists. So in honour of the best friends we've ever had (on paper), iThought it would be nice to appreciate the spirit with which we befriended them. I'll raise a glass of orange juice to our former selves!
Speaking of old friends-- Asterix & Obelix, how you crack me up! It's interesting how many comics I read as a child and how parents nowadays don't think it's good for their little ones to pick up the habit. That's like denying us our Sunday funnies. What's a kid without some Charlie Brown or Calvin'n'Hobbes?
Imaginary tigers are surprisingly wise.
Write you later. Go read something.
- the illiterate Blogger -
