[For this year’s
installment of my annual
Beach Reads series, I wanted to revisit favorites from different stages of
my life, all of which would make for fun additions to your summer bookbag.
Share your nominations for Beach Reads for a crowd-sourced weekend post that
doesn’t mind some sand between the pages!]
On the
book that helped push me out of my comfort zone, both as a reader and as a
thinker.
In
yesterday’s post I highlighted what I would call the first genuine stage in
this AmericanStudier’s evolution as a reader: finding those books that first spoke
to me and shaped me in individual, specific, and enduring ways. It’s fair to
say that they did so in part because they connected to nascent interests and
passions that would remain central to my identity and perspective throughout my
life—in the fantastic
and related literary genres, in the case of David and the Phoenix; in mystery
fiction, in the case of the Hardy Boys. That is, while those books
certainly helped shape those particular interests as well as my overall
identity, they did so in relatively comfortable ways; while such comfort is not
at all a bad thing, and is probably necessary to making those initial
connections with stories and books, I firmly believe it can and should be
supplemented by some discomfort, by those works that compel us in part because
they push us beyond the bounds of what we instinctively enjoy (while still
entertaining and enriching us, that is—I’m not advocating for masochistic
reading!).
For me,
one of the first works to push me in that way was John Bellairs’ The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull (1984). One of the early works in Bellairs’ Johnny Dixon series, Spell certainly shared some key features
with both David and the Hardy Boys—a
youthful protagonist who finds himself involved in a supernatural and
mysterious situation—but with a couple of very significant differences, both
captured by the book’s
cover: that protagonist, Johnny, confronted the book’s villains and
terrors on his own, both because of his status as an orphan and because the
story’s plot involved his mentor figure going missing; and those threats were
indeed terrifying, far more scary to this young adult reader than either the
scientist villain in David or any of
the Hardy’s antagonists. Spell kept
me up at night in distinctly different ways than did those earlier books, which
I simply wanted to keep reading into the wee hours; I felt somewhat the same
about Bellairs’ book, but also didn’t want to stop reading because that would
entail turning off the light and wondering if the Sorcerer’s Skull was lurking
in the shadows in the corner of my room. That fear, it’s worth adding,
paralleled very fully Johnny’s own emotions, making his journey mine in a way
that was also distinct from my connections to the protagonists of my other
early favorites.
That kind
of empathetic
connection is certainly one reason why Bellairs’ book impacted me the way it
did, and why I’m highlighting it in a post in this series. But I’d still
emphasize even more fully the effects of reading something that made me
distinctly uncomfortable—not, again, in a painful way, but in terms of being
unsettled, of experiencing unfamiliar sensations, of feeling emotionally, psychologically, and
intellectually challenged by what I was reading. It’s certainly fair to say
that such discomfort shouldn’t be our most central association with reading or
with art in general—living in the world produces enough discomfort without
consistently seeking it out in our artistic experiences! But it’s equally fair
to say that our perspectives can’t grow and expand if we’re always comfortable,
and that being challenged and pushed beyond what we have known and what we
instinctively enjoy is one important and valuable way to become a more rounded
and successful person within that world, within our communities, and in our own
skin. Johnny Dixon and John Bellairs helped me do that from a young age, and
despite—no, in conjunction with—those late-night shivers, I’ll always be
grateful.
Next Beach Read
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Beach Reads you’d nominate?
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