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Someone near and dear yet far away handed me a paperback to read and keep. My heart skipped a beat at the thought of him even thinking of bringing me one of his favorite reads. As handsome as he is intelligent, he lives miles away from me, and our paths cross a couple of times a year. He is a youngster. Well, actually he is in his third decade, but he is a youngster to me.
Standing with him in the sunshine that afternoon, I looked at the title of the book he had just given to me: Howl's Moving Castle. Uh-oh. I felt conflicted. Happy over his thoughtfulness; uncertain about the book.
"It's fantasy," he said, "a classic, published in 1990." I didn't tell him I don't read fantasy, or that I mostly read stories about stuff that really happened, or that make-believe doesn't interest me, or that I'm too levelheaded to wrap up in a tale that could never happen in a million years. Instead, I told him, "I'll read it," and I meant what I said. I brought it home and laid it on the stack on my nightstand.
Sometime later, when Howl's Moving Castle had climbed to the top of the stack, I started reading about witches and spells and a castle that moved around on the hillsides. How absurd, and oh, how wonderfully entertaining. Turning the pages, I would catch myself smiling or even laughing out loud. I also uncovered some subtle life lessons in the nonsense.
Reading outside of one's preferred genre can be downright enlightening, and as I am writing this commentary, I realize that in all this time of thinking I don't read fantasy, in reality, I do. Not too long ago, I read Pippi Longstocking (she cracked me up), and I read three books in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket -- The Wide Window, The Bad Beginning, and The Reptile Room. Those books are hilarious, and the imagination of the authors, if I may use a cliche, blows my mind.
Why would I, a levelheaded, sensible, down-to-earth reader, be delving into such frivolity? One reason is that I sometimes buy silly books at library sales or in thrift stores, with the intention of giving them away, and I cannot resist reading them before I do. Another reason, as I told a friend, is that I did not have the luxury of books in my childhood, and I am making up for it now. I am satisfying the child within.
If you happened to read a recent post on this blog where I revealed that someone accused me of not having fun, you will understand why I say this now: See? I'm not as serious as I appear. I can have fun when I want to. I can have as much fun as a fictional girl named Sophie, who, while under a witch's spell that turned her into a ninety-year-old woman, posed as a housekeeper and went about tidying up the Wizard Howl's disgustingly dirty castle.
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