I don’t like reading. I don’t really love reading either, even if I might say it and it’s probably partly true. No, my relationship with reading is much, much stronger, more important, than that. I don’t know if I can put it in words – which is sort of ironical, I think, because words are what most people think reading is about (but most people are wrong, because they don’t know what reading is. They’ve tried it, and they think they master it, but they fail to see that no one can really be the Master of Words, or what reading really is. They look at two dogs and see only a couple of dogs, not two individual living, breathing, different beings).
Yes, I might say I love reading, if you ask me, but not because I do. Just because the true answer is too complicated, would take too long, would need words I cannot summon on the spot. Which is what I like about my blog, because I can write my thoughts about it here, take as much time as I need to come up with the right way to write them down, and don’t care if anyone ever reads it, or, if I want to, show it to someone I think will find my words and thoughts interesting.
Which is also some part of what reading is about: thoughts and words, that, when they are read by the right person, come alive, create a new colourful world that is different and special to each person who reads it. It is different from the world the writer saw, too. When you read these words, you will see something different in them than what I have in mind when I write them, now. Perhaps a little different, perhaps very different. Perhaps so different I would barely recognise it if I could see it. Which is a good thing; it’s what makes humans interesting, and what makes us different from each other. It’s why reading and writing is so fantastic, amazing, and, above all, wonderful.
I don’t love reading, because reading is, to me, and to many others, so much more than that. Reading is my life. It defines me. It makes me happy. It makes me cry. It makes me scream with joy, or terror, or excitement, or love. The books I have read, so many fewer than I would wish, have given me worlds filled with friends and enemies, humour and sadness, horror and delight. I have found friends through books, though mostly on the Internet, because too few around me appreciate what books can give, and for some of those around me who do, I am a source of books and discussion, and perhaps even the person who made them read in the first place, and for that I am proud.
I have found many authors, and I will continue to find them as I live on – for I am still young and inexperienced; I have lived less than a fifth of what I can expect – and they have become like grandfathers and grandmothers to me, even the younger ones: someone who tells me stories I love and enjoy and look forward to, someone I can look up to, and want to be like, for I wish to be an author when I grow up. I am a writer, now, but my stories and poems are written solely for myself, and few people have seen what I write. Most of those are teachers. I do not show my writings to friends or family if I’m proud of them, and even when I’m not proud of what I’ve written, I seldom show it anyway. And exception is my short Christmas story, because I wrote it at a time when I was very new to a language, and I feel proud of how well I wrote back then, considering. I’m still pretty new to English, but I try to do my best, and I even write some of my stories in English only – for training in English; exploring, pushing and expanding my limits and vocabulary; and the most important reason: some stories, when they come to me, demand to be written in English, because they tell me, and I know it’s true, that they would not work in Norwegian. I wish I knew more languages, because then more stories would come to me, those stories that only work in languages I don’t know. They know I can’t write them in the right language, and therefore they do not come to me. I don’t think they go to someone else instead; I think they lie waiting, and will show themselves to me when I learn the right language. Which might be next year, or in ten years, or in half a century, or never.
That is one of the reasons I want to learn more languages. The others are that I like the way languages are built, I like to speak to people in their own language, and I want to read stories in the language they were meant for.
I hope that this has given possible readers of this blog an idea of my relationship with reading. I don’t know if I managed to explain properly why I love reading, but I hope my words have given some sense of why reading is so important to me, even if it’s difficult to put in words, and especially in English (though I couldn’t write it in Norwegian, for then there would be too many I could not show this to). But I think that if someone has a similar relationship with reading, that they see what I mean.
I try to spread reading and my love for books as much as I can. I think reading makes life easier in so many ways. You meet other people and cultures, you see other ways of living, you meet new interesting worlds, you have somewhere to go if there’s just too much and you need to get away, and you learn things. If you read a history book or a book about maths, it’s quite obvious what you learn. But many people have no idea of what you can learn from a book that tells a fictional story, and especially if it’s a fantasy story, even when they have read many such books, and perhaps even enjoy that, and read mostly those books. I don’t trust myself to explain it properly, so I won’t try. I just hope that you know what I’m talking about, and that you understand it and can explain it better than me (and that goes for reading and books in general). If you do, I would be happy to read your explanation, and share it with others, for to me it’s important to spread reading to as many people as possible. I know and accept that there are some people who don’t like to read, people who don’t see the point of it. For some of these, it is true; reading is not for them. They can have books, and oral storytelling. But for some, they just don’t know what they’re missing, or they haven’t found the right books. Or, they have got the wrong impression of reading for some reason, and those people need only read the right thing and talk to the right people to have their impression corrected.
Perhaps you noticed it, and perhaps you didn’t, but I said, a little over 250 words ago, that I love books. If you noticed it, you might think it was a slip on my part, for have I not just spent well over a thousand words (that’s pretty much correct, if you check) saying that I don’t love reading, that it’s much more complicated than that?
Well, that’s true, but reading and books are different. You don’t need a book to read, you can have a newspaper, or a magazine, or the Internet, or just a paper with letters that form words on. But for me, books are my main source of reading, in two ways: I read mostly books, and when I don’t read books, I often read about books, or things that have something to do with books.
Books are, in some ways, my best friends. They are always there for me, in a way that a human being, or living beings in general, can’t be. I can’t take a person or a dog – I know I will have a dog when I move away from home, for here I live with my hyperallergic father and my cat-loving mother – with me wherever I go (because they have their own lives to live, even if they happen to live it around me often), they can’t be with me when I wake up in the middle of the night, they can’t always keep me company when I’m ill and have to stay at home.
But books can. I have my little library that I share with my family in the other living room (which mostly contains books, movies, Donald Duck comics (and books and pockets), and comfy chairs. And an oven, with lots of firewood beside it, to keep the room warm), and I have the three shelves with books in my room. Those three are each about a metre long, and very full. The one closest to the ceiling bears almost all of the books I own but haven’t read yet, plus my Harry Potter books (because I sometimes need to check a detail in them, or find a quote, and since this may happen in the middle of the night, I like not having to get out of bed to find them), which is about sixty books in all. None of those books are thin, so sixty is a lot for that metre of shelf. And it doesn’t help that I add books much faster than I can read (which is saying something, because I read a lot every day, and I’m not a slow reader). There is also an elephant made of crystal-looking glass that a friend gave me for Christmas (either last Christmas or the one before that), and a pretty bookmark that I got from my aunt and her family the same Christmas. I treasure both highly, or they wouldn’t be on that shelf.
The second shelf contains my Bible, and my two New Testament books, and a book that explains some of the texts from the Bible in a way that is easier to understand, meant for teenagers. I also have a Shoe Box full of Things and Dust on that shelf, and a miniature horse that is prancing and looks like it might be underwater. On this shelf I have put my to-read Tolkien books too, and my Complete Shakespeare.
On the bottom shelf, I have my fairytale books (I have several, some of them are Norwegian fairytales, some from all over the world, and one of the books is the copy The Tales of Beedle the Bard, in Norwegian, that I gave to my brother for Christmas in 2008), and one thin and old-looking book that is my father’s, which stood out to me because of a coincidence, and since I don’t believe in coincidences, I figured I was somehow meant to read it, but that was before I made the top shelf my to-read shelf, so it was put on the bottom shelf, and hasn’t been moved since. I also have The Brontê Omnibus there, and The Dark Tower by Stephen King (the seventh book in the Dark Tower series), lying on top of my note books, in which I have written stories, my pre-Deathly Hallows notes (and what I thought the chapter names of Deathly Hallows should be translated with in Norwegian, and the birthday dates of as many Harry Potter characters as I could find, and character names I like, found in books, that think would be good names for my children, though the two names I’m 99,99% sure I will give to my daughters if I have two daughters are not written down yet), and, since 18th of February 2009, I also write down which book I’m reading in one of the notebooks, and the date I start and finish it. Oh, and there’s also a few pages in my notes about where I dream of living, but I doubt much of that will come true. Not because I don’t think I have the resources and time to fulfil my dreams, but because some of my dreams are very crazy and depends on other people dreaming of the same, which I don’t think anyone else is.
Also on the bottom shelf, I have a copy of a book where one of my stories is published. It was from a project called Skrivekløe 2007 (Itch of Writing 2007), where all the 8th graders in the area were invited to write stories and poems, and their teachers would pick out a given number of texts from each class, and these were published in a real book. A few of my closest friends have texts in that, and one of them was also asked to illustrate one of the other children’s story. My cousin (the one who is the same age as me) has a poem in that, which I still laugh at when I think of it. Not because it was a bad poem, but because I could never imagine him writing that. And neither could he; he handed it in to his teacher as a joke. I’ll probably read it at his wedding, if he marries. (I hope no one reads my story at my wedding, it was terrible and one of the worst things I’ve ever written.)
Back to sharing books. I’m trying to convey my love of books to my brother, who is six years old, so I’m giving him books for Christmas. In 2008, he got the Norwegian translation of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, as I’ve already mentioned, and last year he also got a book, though I can’t remember which. This year, I was also planning to give him a book, but I had not come up with a title yet.
Until last Monday.
I was in town after a visit to the optician, and while waiting for my father to finish work so he could come and pick me up, I wandered a bit around, looking in shops, mostly because I know Christmas will be here soon. And of course I went to the bookstore.
Now, I usually try to avoid going into bookstores, because quite often I’m broke when I finally manage to get out of them, but the day before this I’d been flying from Oslo (the capital of Norway) and home, and I’d lost my wallet on the airport, so I couldn’t buy anything. Which means going into a bookstore was, for once, a safe thing to do.
I looked quickly over the Top Ten Bestseller Shelves, but as usual, I found little of interest there, because I’m not a big fan of Crime Fiction, and the Children’s and Young Adults’ Books Bestsellers and the English Bestsellers consisted mostly of Sparkly Vampire books, which I have learned the hard way are best to avoid. Then I started my tour in the bookstore for real in the English section, where I looked for books to put on my wishlist.
I don’t think I found any, but that’s not important now. Because after I’d looked in the English section, I went over to the Children and Young Adults sections. I didn’t find any interesting YA books (except for those I already have in English), but in the Children’s section I found a book that looked interesting.
The colours on the cover were mostly light, ghostly blue, and some black, and the illustration was a tall black-haired man, dressed in black, and beside him stood a young boy with yellow hair with clothes in that spooky blue colour. Both had their hand in their pockets, and the boy was scowling at me, the tall man was looking at me with a sort of indifferent stare, one eyebrow raised, and I felt his eyes were saying “Whoever you are, I’m not interested in you, so please just walk on.” In the background, there was a graveyard.
This struck something inside me, and I thought, “that looks like an interesting book. I think I’d like to read it.” (I think the tall man in black’s eyes played a very big part in making me feel that way.) So I looked closer, and read the name of the author, and my heart skipped at least two beats.
I felt happy inside. The name said Neil Gaiman, one of my favourite authors, had written the book, and when I put that together with the cover, I knew before reading the title which book it was.
It was The Graveyard Book. (Well, the title said Kirkegårdsboken, but that translates in English as The Graveyard Book.)
Inside me, there was joy, and happiness, and excitement, and I think I might havemade some sound to express my happiness too, perhaps even words (my mind wasn’t working properly, because of Joy Overload). I know I was smiling very broadly, and a lot of people probably thought I’d gone mad, but I didn’t care at all.
I’ve been wanting to read The Graveyard Book since I first found out about it, close to a year ago, I think. But with the very limited amount of money that can be expected in the pockets of a sixteen-year-old who doesn’t have a job, and doesn’t get pocket money from her parents, I could not afford it. Sometimes my parents are willing to buy a book for me, but already at that point, they thought I had too many books that I hadn’t read (and there are many more now), so I had no hope of them buying it to me. I thought about ordering it on the Internet, but my bank account is not allowed to buy on the Internet, and my parents would notice if I got a book in the mail with a bill (I can use the Internet bank, even if I can’t use my card to place orders). Don’t tell my parents, but when I buy books in the bookstore, I don’t tell them about it, because they are of the opinion that I have more than enough books already. I strongly disagree.
The only way I could buy the book was by finding it in a bookstore. But the local bookstores have a very limited number of books in the English section, and I have never seen any Neil Gaiman books there (the Gaiman books I have, I bought when I was in London, except for Stardust, which I have in Norwegian, and got for Christmas a few years ago from my aunt and read the same night), so I had no hope of finding The Graveyard Book there. I could only be patient and wait, hoping that one day, I might get the chance to purchase it. In the meantime, I would listen to Neil Gaiman himself reading the book on MouseCircus.com. (I’ve only heard Chapter One, but that man sure knows how to read aloud!)
So you can imagine how happy I was, when I found Kirkegårdsboken in the bookstore. After calming myself down a bit, I called my sister (who is two years younger than me), and told her I’d found the perfect Christmas gift for our brother, and that we had to go to town and buy it as soon as possible because it might sell out and that she had to pay because I’d lost my wallet.
My sister didn’t understand much of what I said (I hadn’t calmed down much and was still overjoyed from my find), but asked which book it was (of course I’d forgotten to tell what I had found that I thought we should give our brother for Christmas, but from my happy voice she figured it was a book), and when I told her, she was a bit sceptical, as she thought it might be a bit too scary for him, but she agreed to go to town another day and buy it, probably because she knew I would never shut up about it if she didn’t.
Two days later, I got my wallet back, and I was happy for that. I had not forgotten my trip to the bookstore.
I thought about it a lot, but I did not have time to go to town again. My excitement cooled a bit as some days passed, and I thought that perhaps my sister was right, perhaps it is too scary for my brother. He’s only six after all. Well, I would not let my chance to buy The Graveyard Book pass me without doing something about it, so I decided to buy it no matter what.
And yesterday, the second Friday since I found the book, I was in town again. I was very tired, because I’d slept only half an hour, and that lightly, the night between Wednesday and Thursday, and early that morning – Friday morning – I had been to the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, with only forty-five minutes of sleep Thursday night. I went to bed some time after 3 am Friday morning, and, even though I did not have school (for some reason, all schools in Norway were closed yesterday; I think that the People who Decide Everything about Schools did this because of the DH Midnight Premiere), I had to get up pretty early, because my sister and I had agreed to help with the food in the funeral for a friend of mine’s grandmother.
After we were done in the kitchen, we went to the bookstore, which was less than a kilometre away, and we bought The Graveyard Book. Well, that is, I bought it, and I said that I was going to give it to our brother for Christmas no matter what, but I would read it first and decide whether it would be this Christmas, or the next, or the next after that.
(I’ll be going on a slightly different subject now, but I’m not quite done talking about The Graveyard Book yet.) Early Tuesday morning (around 2.30 am), I finished reading The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, which is the 13th book in the late Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. He intended the series to be 12 books long, but sadly, he died in September 2007, having written only 11 of the books. WoT fans from all over the world grieved, both for the passing of such a great author and person, and because with him, the last Wheel of Time book also died.
But that was not the case, for Jordan, who knew his life was ending because of an illness called cardiac amyloidosis, left notes (and some finished scenes too, I think) both on paper and orally to close friends and family. Some time after his death, his wife, Harriet McDougal, asked relatively unknown author and WoT-fan Brandon Sanderson if he could write the last book, with the help of Jordan’s notes. Sanderson said yes, but while writing, he discovered that the last book, named A Memory of Light by Jordan, would be thrice as long as a normal WoT book (which are all somewhere between 700 and 1000 pages long), and with McDougal, he decided to make it three books: The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight, and A Memory of Light.
In November 2008, I discovered the Wheel of Time books through a person on www.cosforums.com (my more or less full WoT-fan history can be found here). I read them as fast as I could, and finished the 11th book, Knife of Dreams, in March 2009. I knew Jordan was dead, and I knew Sanderson was going to finish the series, and I found out that The Gathering Storm would be published in October that year. I ordered it in August, to be sure I got it, but when it finally came, I felt that I’d forgotten too many details of the incredibly detailed WoT world to read it without rereading all the previous books first, and I didn’t feel like reading that many books when I had so many other books waiting.
I did start a reread though, in April this year I think, since Towers of Midnight was going to be published in November 2010. The reading went slow, as I didn’t feel like rushing it, and I had lots of other books I wanted to read. So my Neil Gaiman books, and my Terry Pratchett books, and several others, had higher priority and were devoured quickly, while Robert Jordan’s books were almost forgotten, and only read occasionally.
As November came nearer (and I was out of Gaiman books to read, except for Good Omens, which he wrote with Terry Pratchett), I realised I needed to hurry up with my reread, for I had 10 more books to read before November 2nd, after all. This was around June, I think. So I hurried up and finished The Eye of the World, the first book in the Wheel of Time series, and hurried through the others as fast as I could.
It was a highly enjoyable reread. I found I had been right, I’d forgotten a lot, and in addition to that, my English had gotten better, and I saw that there were a lot of things I had not understood properly the first time I read the books.
The summer holidays were busy, so I did not have as much time for reading as I would’ve wished, and, to my dismay, I found that when school started again, I had much more schoolwork than the year before. I read when I could, and when I was reading Knife of Dreams again, late in October, I saw my deadline – November 2nd – come closer, and I started taking KoD with me wherever I went.
I did not make the deadline. I finished KoD some days after that, and immediately started The Gathering Storm, which I also brought with me wherever I went, and read while waiting for school to start, and in breaks between classes, and while waiting for the bus home. I hoped that when I finished GS, Towers of Midnight would have arrived so that I could read that to.
But when I finished The Gathering Storm the 16th, ToM was not here. I asked in the bookstore, and they told me it was here yet. I asked again yesterday, when I bought The Graveyard Book, but they told me it wasn’t even on its way, and that they were sorry for this (I think they really were, I have been noticed there, and I think they know how much I love books).
I didn’t know what to do, because I was so into the Wheel of Time universe, having had a WoT book with me since April, and I didn’t want to break that by reading another book while waiting for Towers of Midnight. And those days, from Tuesday to Friday, yesterday, were terrible for me. I read at least one chapter (or 20 pages) of a fiction book every day, and I have done so for years. I felt lonely, as if all my friends had abandoned me.
They hadn’t of course – I had abandoned them: my books.
But I endured my loneliness, if barely, because I was still in the world Robert Jordan created, and very reluctant to leave it before I’d read ToM.
And yesterday, I found a book that would not distract me too much from the world I wanted to be in. I started The Graveyard Book, and today, I’ve read 120 pages of it. (I can’t read it around my brother – for obvious reasons – so it’s going a bit slower than it would have otherwise.)
This far, it looks like my brother will find it under this year’s Christmas three. I will read it aloud to him, so if he thinks it’s scary, I can be there for him. A little scare is healthy for him, and scary books are easier to look away from than scary movies – but at the same time, they may be worse because you create the images yourself, and the degree of scariness in it depends on your own imagination. It’s like the nightmare I had after watching The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time: the Balrog was so much more frightening in my head than in the movie, so I dreamt of my Balrog and was scared from sleep that night.
But I thank Neil Gaiman, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robert Jordan, and many others, for all they have given me. I hope I can help them give my brother the same.
PS: Here’s the cover on The Graveyard Book I bought. I really like it. No, I love it; I think it’s one of my favourite book covers ever.
