“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”

  

Six months later I've finally found (read:made) time for a blog post.  I've false started quite a few times since my last post; drafting is good for the soul but nothing that resulted was deemed post-worthy.  The interwebs are already overrun with posts detailing the corruptness of politicians, the inanity of TV talking heads, or the ever-unstable economy and nothing that was flowing from my proverbial pen seemed more than a carefully worded regurgitation of others' remarks.  Hopefully what follows provides slightly more original food for thought.  Incidentally major spoilers lie ahead for a variety of books, proceed at your own risk...

I've always loved to read.  I'm not entirely certain from whence the attraction arose but throughout my life few things have consistently satisfied like time spent with a good book.  The power of literature to stir emotion and excite imagination is almost unparalleled.  In fact, seventeen years later I can still remember my first visceral reaction to a book.

I was eight years old and the book was Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson.  I remember sobbing in my parents' room after having snuck in to finish the book my mother had been reading to me, only to discover that the wonderful tale of childhood imagination I had been enjoying took a tragic turn in its final pages.  Books were supposed to be safe.  No matter how many times I read "Are You My Mother?" the baby bird always found his mommy but the reunion was never in the jaws of the neighborhood cat, Pop got hopped on but that hopping didn't rupture his kidney, fishes were counted and sorted according to color, not fried in oil while their fishy friends gazed on in horror.

Imagine my horror then upon learning that main characters could die.  And not in the "just wait a few pages, they'll be back" sort of way The Lord of the Rings had taught me.  Leslie was dead, and no amount of wishing could make it otherwise. I was ripped from the nursery and cast into the cold, desolate world of "children's classics".  But amidst my grief there were lessons to be learned.  The hole left by life's partings can be filled, a new queen of Terabithia can be crowned, loss is to be dealt with constructively. Other books followed with equally disturbing moments and equally important lessons: the horrors of racism and the love of family and mankind which can overcome it in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and To Kill a Mockingbird, the dangers of a world without creativity and the wonder of a sled ride in The Giver to name just a few.

Those lessons and myriad others have stayed with me long after the final pages were turned.  Great literature, the kind that stretches and challenges our assumptions and world-view, is priceless.  It is that pricelessness which makes me so disconcerted to see "Twilight" and "Harry Potter" listed on many "favorites" lists.  It isn't that such books are "bad", there is just precious little "great" about them.  Long on entertainment, short on substance.  I think about the time I was blessed to spend discussing difficult questions regarding slavery in the post-war South, or mankind's capacity for evil after reading particularly challenging books and worry about a literary generation raised on a steady diet of fluff.