When I was a child, my father and mother used to read aloud to me. Mom doesn’t remember exactly when I learned to read; she said only that one day I snatched the book out of her hands and began to form the words myself.
Devout Christians, my parents didn’t believe in novels. True life tales, good. Nature books and historical accounts, better. Bible stories, best of all. When we ventured into Barnes and Noble one autumn afternoon and I pulled a Boxcar Children book off the shelf, begging my mother to buy it for me, she was devastated. After that, keeping me away from novels was a constant struggle.
My friends were allowed to have novels. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings were discussed and dissected while I sat by, miserably wishing I could partake in these literary adventures too. Then one day my friend Heather suggested that I borrow a book of hers, sneaking it to my house under my jacket. I tried it, and it worked. From then on, I smuggled books as often as I could. A Series of Unfortunate Events; Dear God, It’s Me, Margaret; The Sweet Valley Twins; Dear America; Jacob Have I Loved; Midnight Magic—they all found their ways in and out of my house. But when Heather lent me her worn copy of Ella Enchanted—well, that’s when I first fell in love. In love with a book filled with fairies and curses and magic shoes—all things I wasn’t allowed to read about. I absolutely had to own the book. So I plotted and planned and saved my allowance. But the opportunity never presented itself. Every time I visited Barnes and Noble, my mom was there, looking over the books I bought to make sure they were up to her standards. When I went to town with my dad, the scrutiny was even worse. My grandmother rarely even let me visit the library for fear that I would read something “bad.” One day, however, I was at the library, and my mom forgot to approve my books before I checked them out. Ella Enchanted was mine for an entire month.
I started with my ridiculous plan as soon as I arrived home. The top half of a metal music stand worked nicely to prop my book open. I started on page one, the very first sentence, and began to painstakingly copy the book onto my computer. I didn’t even know how to type, but I could do nearly 40 wpm by the hunt and peck method. Day after day, I labored through chapter after chapter, experiencing the story of Ella Enchanted in a way perhaps no other reader ever has. I was copying the book, word by word, page by page, chapter by chapter. The worst was the languages. There was Ayorthian and Gnomic and Elfian and Ogrese and Abdegi to figure out. I had to painstakingly type out phrases like “,fwthchor evtoogh brzzay eerth ymmad boech evtoogh brzzaY” just to communicate the Gnomish way to say “Digging is good for the wealth and good for the health.” I mean, no one is contesting that Gail Carson Levine is a genius. But did she have to make it that difficult for me to illegally copy her book? Of course, I wasn’t thinking of it that way when I was 13. I was just thinking of the joy I’d experience when at last, that wondrous story was mine to read whenever I wanted.
It took me a month to copy 288 pages. I’m sure my mom wondered why I was spending so much time plunking away at the gritty keyboard of my massive desktop computer. I’m sure she and my father wondered why I wanted a computer that badly anyway. The old Dell only ran Windows 95 and the moniter, which probably weighed more than my massive full-grown lab, barely fit on the top of my oak desk (which was so large itself it probably could’ve withstood a whole year of airraids without suffering a scratch). My computer didn’t have internet. It didn’t run any computer games and even though it had Windows Media Player, I had no CDs to listen to anyway. But it had Microsoft Word, and that was all I cared about.
When I finished my project, I felt a sense of accomplishment that rivaled that I felt when I bought my first bicycle, or the time I climbed my first real mountain at the age of eleven. It didn’t really matter if I ever read Ella Enchanted again. My actions were grounded in a devotion to the written word that would form and shape my life from then on. I had a passion for books which drove me to do something radical. I can’t really say I’ve done anything so radical since—I don’t even count the 200,000+ words of fanfiction I’ve written, or the lies I’ve told in order to borrow my parents’ car and drive to Walmart to pick up a midnight release, or the year I read 500 books and did little else, or the time I didn’t sleep for five days to read the first four Harry Potter books.
Why are novels so engaging? I have a healthy respect for nonfiction. I like blogging myself and have on many occasions enjoyed a good self-help book or a well-written history. But there is nothing as powerful as an engaging story. If you don’t believe that, well, see above. Anyway. Now that I’m all grown up I can own as many novels as I want. I can even freely display them in my living room, organized on neat white bookcases by author and genre.
Life is good.
But I still think I’ve lost that radical side of me.
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