books

A Hellish Night Indeed

Drenched in sweat, tears leaking down my face, I woke up repeatedly from the most horrid night’s sleep I’ve had in memory. Tossing and turning and throwing blankets off and pulling them back on again, I could not get any rest.

In the books, in my lovely, loved books, the heroes always sleep badly before a battle, before a grand decision, when there’s a monarch’s life on the line or at least a wedding or something else significant the next day. For me? None of these. Today is not a special day, is not supposed to be anything special or life-altering or even exciting. No offense to Monday, the 20th of October.

So why? I have no answer. I just know that of all the nightmarish nights that I’ve endured – and I’ve had my fair share, believe me – this was the worst. I dreamt of my boyfriend dying, I dreamt of every mundane chore and how I cried through it because of his death. When I woke up from the dream, it took my a full ten minutes of lying in bed and sobbing to realize that it was just a dream. Even after that, I spent the next four hours until my alarm was to ring waking time and again thinking I was late, thinking it was a different day, panicking that it was afternoon and I’d missed the bus I’m to take.

Small wonder then, that I feel like I’ve been up all night running.

A Complaint Of The Spoiled

I have too many books to read. Ridiculous, I know. Not too many in the sense that I won’t have time and that I need to read a certain amount of books and meet a deadline. No, no, it’s much worse than that in the stupidity scale of complaints. No, I have too many books to read, literally, and I want to read them all right now, this second, and I can’t.

Why can’t I? Why, indeed. Mostly because I’m a nostalgic idiot and I promised myself I’d reread a trilogy of books I read years ago. Just because I felt like it. As I am strange, I am actually honering that vow to myself and so I’m now in the second book of the trilogy. Each book, I might add, is at least seven-hundred pages long. This is part of why I adore these books – they’re long, drawn out sagas that make me marvel at how the authoress invented such political and dramatic tangles.

But now I have a shelf-full of books that I bought in London, just waiting for me to pick them up and crack the cover for the first time. I can just feel the heat of their glares, the way they’re clamoring for attention in their silent way. Should I read Wicked first, or perhaps the light and fun Stephanie Meyer novel?

Oh, woe is me. What a hard life I do lead.

A Thousand Words: So Much More Than A Picture

Three in the morning, the lit hands of the clock tell you. You glance down, uncaring. For why should you care? Nothing in the world is more important right now than the hero, the heroine, the man in the cloak or the maiden in distress. Nothing is more important than the dragon atacking the village or the homely man begging for food. Nothing at all.

You inhale the smell of the pages, the new white pages. Sometimes they’re old, dusty, crinkly, yellow pages. Those are the best. They smell like memories, they smell of thunderstorms and late nights and train-rides and parks. Those pages are a life unto themselves, wrapping in them so many words, so many emotions and stories.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Surely not. A picture could never come close to the feeling of reading a four page description of a landscape or a dinner table or an outfit. A picture cannot encompass the feelings of a desperate man or stranded woman or a wounded soldier.

Three in the morning, the lit hands of the clock tell you. You sigh, happily. As long as there are books in the world, you can be at peace.

Imaginary Friends and Make-Believe Games

Children have some remarkable imaginations about them. I was eavesdropping today on the two mothers at work, and they were talking about how their children went into the curious phase – they keep asking “What’s this?” and “But why?” and “How, Mommy?”.

It made me remember the awesome things that we could do when we were kids. We could climb up on the jungle-gym, and we’d decide we were on a ship, and lo and behold, we were on a ship. We could be animals, we could be oppisate genders. I had a particular friend who wanted to be Ariel, the Little Mermaid, and that I’d be her father. This friend was a boy. But it didn’t matter then, did it, because it was normal, we were all just curious.

Imaginary friends were the best thing ever. They were invisible, they had super-powers, they had everything we couldn’t have and everything we wanted desperately. But we never got jealous of them, we never got angry at them. They were the best companions we could ever have.

In Sophie’s World, an excellent book by the way, there’s a lot of emphasis on how the curiosity of children is what makes them demand answers to everything all the time, that philosophers are the ones who never lose that child-like curiosity, the intense need to know WHY.

Getting old and bitter and losing any trace of curiousity is, I think, the most scary thing in the world.

“I’m a genre too, you know,” squeaked the little book sadly.

So sue me. I like reading books that are written well but that are also readable. Books that I can enjoy reading without having to strain my brain enough that reading three pages makes me exhausted for the whole day. I like reading books with a good story- something exciting, interesting, philosophical and enthralling by turns.

You know what books fall under those catagories quite often? Fantasy books, sci-fi books. I wish people would stop looking down on books of those genres. Have you read Orson-Scott Card? Neil Gaiman? Terry Pratchett and China Meville? If you haven’t then how the hell can you make a polite but mocking face when you look at the book I’m reading?!

I loved Jane Eyre, I loved Pride and Prejudice. I enjoyed A Clockwork Orange immensely. But those classics are still not as enjoyable, fun or  wonderful to me as books such as American Gods or Un-Lun-Dun or Ender’s Game.

So please, World-At-Large, stop looking at fantasy and sci-fi as non-genres.