I’ve been sick since Sunday, which is a terrible state to be in no matter who you are. I always find it particularly hard going because most of the things that would keep my mind off being sick are things I can’t manage to do while I’m sick. I can lie about watching DVDs, but if I am just watching a DVD that a sick brain can process, I invariably get restless, and if it’s something more complicated, with subtlety or subtitles, I can’t focus.
Reading, therefore, is equally difficult, but God, was I desperate to read something, anything this week. So I started pulling books I’d already read, novellas and YA titles from my youth, slim little volumes that can be read in a few hours even by the foggy brained, off the shelf at random.
One of these books was by a former favourite author who I hadn’t read in a good ten years.
At eleven, I adored her and her books, although at the time they were impossible to find outside of my library. I continued to reread them regularly and anything new the author put out into junior high.
And then I hit that point where I was simultaneously exploring adult novels, post-modern novels, classic novels, all sorts of things, gradually broadening my horizons. I dropped authors whose books I owned in the dozens, trading them in at the used bookstore or moving them up to the attic library in our house, where all old things no one could bear to part with went, to gather dust and act as effective camouflage during candy hunts at birthdays and Easter. These books were suddenly childish, shallow, poorly written, repetitive, any number of criticisms a grumpy teenager could throw at something they suddenly found they had grown out of.
Most of these books I was well-rid of, and can hardly claim to miss them. But these books I didn’t quite have the heart to drag off to a used bookstore, even when I was moving more of the dusty stacks from the library on a recent visit to my parents’ house. Nostalgia, maybe, or the fact that my younger self had put her name and address, complete with postal code, on the inside of the front cover.
So I was quite surprised when I pulled one of these books off the shelf yesterday and was reading it on the bus, and not experiencing the usual writhing shame and embarrassment that ensues when you revisit something from your childhood. It was like my adolescent self’s arrogant discarding of the books all those years ago wiped away the nostalgia and lead me to expect the books to be terrible. Instead, it was almost like starting with a clean slate.
I can remember so much with such clarity – there are no surprises here – and I can see all the flaws. But I can also see what was done well, what was interesting or different considering the time the books were written, even when compared to the bulk of what’s published today. I can see why my younger self loved these books, why they still have strong merit as reading materials for similarly aged children.
It’s an amazingly pleasant experience and one I never expected.
prelapsarian
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