When I was a teen I used to make an adventure of visiting Sydney’s library with my father, as I mentioned in a previous post. Before I was old enough to make the hour trip into the city, my dad used to bring me books on a weekly basis. Sometimes, like when I discovered Roald Dahl at the age of nine, he would have to visit the library three times a week in order to keep up with my appetite, others, when my brain’s appetite had subsided, he would choose the books for me.
It’s the knowledge from this variety of fiction that I draw on in my day to day life, more so than my university degree. There’s little details you learn from reading that you just can’t get from a text book or the film-adaptation.
When I was twelve, my Dad brought for me a Peter Dickinson novel called The Kin. It was one of those “novels” for children with really big font, and thus, huge amounts of pages. I’d carry around the heavy tome with glee, my back and shoulders aching. The accomplishment in finishing one of these epic stories!
This particular book was about six stranded children roaming around Africa two hundred thousand years ago. It taught me three things:
one: Before humans as we know them today ruled the chook pen, there was different mixes of monkey/human kinds. This, more than my Catholic upbringing, told me that we were descendants of chimps.
two: Children who grow up together can fall in love, like the way I pined for a boy called Llewellyn in year six. We were in the same class two years in a row, and during assembly, our last names meant that we sat next to each other, our knees sometimes brushing. It was somewhere between sitting cross legged on the cold wooden floor and singing the school anthem, I knew that our one-sided love was meant to be.
three: Salt was used as a commodity. I can still remember the paragraph; a strange man opening up a tightly bound leather package to reveal a cool, white rock. He scrapes off a sliver of the rock and places it on our heroine’s tongue, where her mouth promptly explodes with flavour. During the next chapter, the girl and her friends scrape off sliver after thin sliver for further mouth explosions until they have to trade the salt like currency. It was like the nectar of the Gods. Apart from teaching me how and why currency was created, this also gave me a convenient explanation of why I used to steal salt when I was a kid. After sneaking into the kitchen, snatching the salt and running away, my younger sister and I would pour the stuff into our palms, lick our forefingers, dip them into the salt and lick, repeat. Yes, I ate salt straight from the container, no, I haven’t got any major health issues because of this. But this book gave me the excuse I needed to eat salt! I was only reliving my ancestral need for mouth explosions.
My favourite book-based memory is when I visited my grandfather in Sri Lanka. He was a school principal and had stacks of books piled into every corner of every room. During the last day of my visit, he caught me rummaging through his books and said I could pick whichever books I want. I picked three economic books (I don’t know why) and a novel by Carolyn Slaughter, a now out of print book, Columba. I only read it when I was back in OzLand, and to this date, it has been the most beautiful and at the same thing, the most saddest thing I’ve ever read. When my grandfather died within months of bestowing this book on me, it esteemed his book to the most prized possession on my book shelf.
Here’s a random excerpt from the novel, so you can capture how each word was beautifully written:
Weeks passed gently. It was nearly September; the days still hot but the humidity gone and the light dying earlier. It was almost Anna’s season and she waited for the leaves to turn. The sea had had enough of bathers – she tossed them roughly away with cold breakers. Soon the beaches would be completely deserted, apart from the dogs taking their masters for strolls among the sand.
Sigh.
When has reading a novel come in use for you? What are some fond memories of your book-consuming days? Please tell.