Monday, April 9, 2012

Happiness is a Good Book

One of the greatest loves of my life is a good story. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or made up, doesn’t matter if it’s told to me by someone or I dream it up myself, and it doesn’t matter if I watch it, read it, or have to fight the same ten French crusaders a million times until I get to find out what happens to Altaïr. I enjoy a good story in any form.

It’s why I have a history degree. My favorite professors were the ones who gave a lecture like they were telling a friend about the latest episode of their favorite TV show. I’d sit there on the edge of my seat and soak it up. I noticed, too, that the lecture would return to the professor in the answers to the essay questions of the tests I took, sometimes down to the exact words. My classmates didn’t really understand why I enjoyed it so much. (Incidentally, if you ever want to be slightly amused for a couple of minutes and then spend the next 15 to 20 trying to get me to shut up, ask me to tell you about the last successful invasion of England.)

When my husband and I got married, I had a great big bookshelf, at least six feet high, and my husband brought two of his own, rather shorter, but deep enough to hold two rows of books on each shelf. They were immediately stuffed with textbooks, historical fiction, D&D sourcebooks, and the works of both Stephen Hawking and C. S. Lewis, in addition to one whole shelf dedicated to DVDs and video games, three cases deep and two high. In the months before we moved away, I spent hours and hours putting a good third or so of the books up for sale on the internet, and getting rid of them in twos and threes.

We still have a good portion of those books, in addition to a couple of boxes stored for “when we move into a bigger place,” and four or five boxes full, which I need to get rid of somehow. We would have even more than we do now, but the best purchase my husband made for us last year was to get us his & hers amazon kindles. (I say “his & hers,” but really they are exactly the same machine and if I didn’t always keep mine in a specific place we’d easily mix them up. The truth is, he wanted one for himself and knew that if he didn’t get one for me that the one he’d purchased for himself would quickly become mine.)

The best thing about having a kindle is the ability to underline something that just resonates with me. I’ve been using it to read so much recently that when I read a particularly amazing passage in a honest-to-goodness paper and print book, I unconsciously reached for the button I’d need to push to manipulate the cursor that would let me underline it. Then I blinked and shook my head like I was waking up, and laughed at myself.

I would never think of underlining or highlighting something in an actual book, but I don’t mind it so much with the kindle. It even keeps track of the things I underline, so that I can go back and savor the best of Jim Butcher’s Dead Beat and roll on the floor laughing without having to read the whole book (not that I would mind doing that, but since it’s in the middle of the series I’d have to start at the beginning again... not that I would mind that either.)

The idea of sullying the page of a book with the touch of a pen, a marker, or even a pencil seems blasphemous to me. I think it was something instilled in me in elementary school, when our textbooks were the property of the school, had been used by the kids one year older than we were, and would be used by the kids in the grade below us next year. It’s like the admonition of the teachers is burned into my brain: “Don’t write in your book!”

It’s also hard to ignore a highlighted passage. You’re reading along, in the middle of a scene, you turn the page, and immediately your eye goes not to the next word or sentence but to the place on the page which the ink is desecrating. (I have the same problem with books that have footnotes.) Then you have to disengage from whatever it says and go back to the place you were originally, maybe even a paragraph or two back, and reinsert yourself into the correct place in the story.

It also makes them pretty hard to get rid of when you’re done with them. (If anyone wants a copy of The Invention of the Restaurant by Rebecca L. Spang covered with my half asleep scrawlings and ideas for the presentation and paper I had to write on it, let me know.) Books lose a lot of their resale value if they’re covered in scribbles. If the scribbles happen to be those of the author, however, the value goes up again. (My copy of The Most Famous Man in America is up for grabs too, sorry Debby Applegate, I did enjoy meeting you!)

I love to read, so it’s sometimes difficult for me to watch movies or television based on the books I love. I recently watched the first episode (and the first episode only) of the Syfy series The Dresden Files. Afterward, I said to my husband, “hey, there were three characters in that show with the exact same names as this book series I love!” I could acknowledge that the show was entertaining, but I was so distracted by the differences between what I’d read and what I’d watched that I was not able to enjoy it the way I was meant to. I’m sure it’s a perfectly good series, but I’m not going to be able to watch it since I am so attached to the books it is loosely based on. I probably would have liked it more if I had watched it before I read the books, but I still would have come to the conclusion that the books are so much better.

That sort of thing is easier when it goes the other way: “expanded universe” books are more enjoyable to me than when a movie changes the way my imagination sees things in a book. When I listened to the audiobook The Stone Rose, it was like getting to watch an extra episode of the 2006 season of Doctor Who in my head (especially since it was read by David Tennant)!

I have purposely avoided watching things like Showtime’s The Tudors, since I’ve studied that particular place and time in history a bit more than others. I’m sure I would enjoy it to some degree, but anyone watching it with me may not like it whenever I had to shout “NO, WRONG” at the screen and having to pause it to listen to me talk about why it was wrong and what really happened and then inevitably coming around to the understanding of why they decided to change it that particular way but that it was still probably going to mess things up later.

The one movie that I still enjoyed, even though it was different from the original book in quite a few places was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Part of the reason I was okay with it being different (especially the ending!) was because I had recently purchased “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide,” and in the introduction, Adams admits that “The history of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is now so complicated that every time I tell it I contradict myself, and whenever I do get it right I’m misquoted. So the publication of this omnibus edition seemed like a good opportunity to set the record straight--or at least firmly crooked. Anything that is put down wrong here is, as far as I’m concerned, wrong for good.”
I also didn’t mind the changes because I knew the kind of involvement Douglas Adams had in writing the screenplay for the movie. I feel that if the author thinks the changes are okay, they should be okay with me, too.

Sometimes, when I’m reading a book, I start to think about how it would be on the big screen. Or I’ll read a certain scene and think, “I can’t wait to see the movie they make out of this book, just for this part!” That was how I felt a lot of the time watching Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. For me, it’s hard to find fault with those movies, even though a few things were different from the book, since almost everything in them looks exactly the way I had imagined them (even “Mr. Bilbo’s trolls”).

The best thing that my love of stories has given me is an understanding of things I would never experience on my own. Because I have this passion, I am able to relate the interesting story of why America has building codes. I know what it’s like to live in modern-day London. And I can explain how one could go about learning to fly (the main idea is to throw yourself at the ground, but miss). The more you love to read, the more new things you will learn. Because when you’re enjoying the story, you don’t even notice that you’re gaining new knowledge; it sneaks in while you’re having a good time.

I hope to instill this love of stories in my children. My husband enjoys stories as well (not quite as much as I do), and we like to sit around talking about the implications of the two European fronts in World War II, or the quiet hints of things to come sprinkled all through a season of Doctor Who. So, I’m sure to succeed in inspiring the same passion for stories that I have in my children.

We certainly have enough books for them to choose from.

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