Category: Book Love

On this, the last day of Banned Books Week, I decided to cast my net a bit further in defining what counts as a book.  And I chose 20th Century Boys, a Japanese manga series by Naoki Urasawa.  It’s an amazing story—honestly, one of the best stories I’ve ever read, hands down—executed with a deft hand for character and pacing and emotional weight.  And it’s in book form, so it counts!

I’ve been a fan of graphic novels and manga for many years now, and I’m incredibly impressed by the breadth and quality of stories told in this serial art format.  From stunning, complicated art styles to very simple styles, these creators weave amazing stories, using panel composition and framing, color and linework, to guide the reader through.

20th Century Boys, in particular, is a favorite of mine.  It follows an ordinary workaday Japanese man named Kenji, thrust suddenly into a conspiracy involving a cult trying to take over the world.  And the seeds of this cult—and the means to stopping them—lie in Kenji’s past, in the stories he and his childhood friends wrote together when they were just kids hanging out in their secret fort.  There’s a LOT more to it than that.  But suffice to say it’s equal parts mystery, thriller, horror, and intense character drama, and the time I devoted to reading it was time very well spent.

I think (I hope) that graphic novels are being viewed more often these days as the mature, varied medium they are.  They encompass a wide variety of genres and have a lot to say to us.  And honestly, there are so many I could recommend to those willing to give them a try.

Anyway, that wraps up my week of talking about books that have had an impact on me!  There are so many more that I could have included here, that I’d love to talk about in future posts.  So, watch this space!

And in the meantime, if any of my listings have inspired you to pick up something new, or at least gotten you thinking about books that have impacted your own life, I’d be happy to hear all about it!  After all, the world can always use more Book Love.

Everyone knows Tolkien.  The influence of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy on the modern fantasy genre cannot be overstated, and Tolkien himself is a household name.  Ask a lot of fantasy writers for someone who was a big influence on them, and many of them will tell stories of reading Tolkien in their youth.

So you don’t need to tell me those books had an impact.  But I will point you to a far less well-known Tolkien work, which had a greater impact on me personally.  Tree and Leaf is a deceptively slim volume, originally containing Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” and the short story “Leaf by Niggle.”  The later edition I read also included his poem “Mythopoeia.”  The book was recommended to me by a friend in college, and I was so glad when I finally tracked it down in my grad school library; at the time, the book was not easy to find.

The essay and the poem are both defenses of the value of myth and fantasy in our lives and in our stories.  While fantasy has broken out much more into the mainstream today, for much of my young life, it was derided as useless at best and actively dangerous at worst.  In academia, professors and even fellow students often didn’t know how to approach it, and assumed that fantasy was intended for younger readers, lacking depth and unable to reach the lofty heights of True Literature.  So reading these defenses were important to me.  They reassured me that the space I chose to play in, the stories I wanted to tell, had value.

And “Leaf by Niggle” is its own gorgeous story whose images continue to haunt me to this day.  It’s a story about a man working tirelessly to achieve his grand artistic vision, and the unexpected way in which that vision is finally realized—in many senses of the word.

So, you could say that Tree and Leaf is Tolkien explaining, exploring, and justifying the act of imaginative creation (or sub-creation, as he would term it).  In prose and poem and essay, he reflects on the value and importance of a topic that meant so much to him—and that means so much to me.

*kicks down door*

Okay, it’s time to put the pedal to the metal this Banned Books Week, by talking about a book about banned books, that has itself been banned!  I am, of course, talking about the science fiction classic, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury is an absolute master of craft, and this book was my gateway drug into his deftly-written work.  He is able to pack so much into his stories with just a few careful strokes.  With only a single sentence, he can evoke entire worlds.  This is what astounded me the first time I read Fahrenheit 451.  Bradbury doesn’t dwell on details—a sharp contrast to the richly-detailed fantastic worlds I was used to reading—and yet he can convey so much.

He didn’t need to spend whole pages describing the malignant robot dogs that chased down our protagonist; he only conveyed just enough that I knew they were terrifying.  To my young imagination, they were lethal shadows, they were ghosts, and my mind could fill in all the details on its own.

As for the story itself, it’s famous enough:  in an unspecified future, the world passively consumes shallow media that’s high on petty drama and low on substance, while books are contraband, fit only to be burned by Firemen.  Our hero, Guy Montag, is one such Fireman, but defects when he is introduced to books and learns to slow down and start paying attention to the world.

Much can and has been said about this book’s reflection on real-world trends:  the speeding up and dumbing down of media, a 24-hour cycle of nonstop sensation at the expense of quieter reflection, and the slow atrophying of our connections to ourselves and others.  Make no mistake, this book’s world is a dystopia and it reflects the very worst of ourselves back at us.  I’m not going to belabor its points here, because this blog entry would go on forever and turn into a book report.

But suffice to say that while I believe some media trends are cause for concern and even active pushback, I am also seeing positive trends in how we tell stories and the sort of stories we are telling.  The human thirst for stories that move us is a bottomless well, deep and full of starlight.

And I will leave you with this:  the most powerful image this book left me with is the image of people who have become books.  Memorized every line, every word, and carried the books with them into the future.  I’ve often wondered what book I would choose to become, if I had to.  Or even if I just wanted to.

We don’t need to memorize books word for word.  But if each of us takes at least one book into our hearts and carries it with us into the future, I think there is hope for us yet.

Every day this week, in honor of Banned Books Week, I will be posting a blurb about a book that has had an impact on me.  Today’s book is Dragonsong, by Anne McCaffrey.

One of the enduring character archetypes of books for younger readers are spunky young heroines who escape the confines of a constricting life and get to a place where they are able/encouraged to flourish.  For me, that heroine was Menolly, in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong.

I’ve talked before about how Dragonquest changed my life, by introducing me to McCaffrey’s Pern series and fostering a lifelong love of dragons and a determination to become a Writer.  Dragonsong was the second Pern book I picked up, and though the main character didn’t become a dragonrider, she did find something more important to her: a place to express herself artistically.  She also broke the glass ceiling in the process, because in Pern, women typically were only taught music as an elective, a trifle to while away their hours—assuming they were allowed to learn at all.  But only men became Harpers.

It’s a systemic inequality that parallels similar structures in the real world.  Through Menolly, we were allowed to imagine an alternative path to success:  if we were brave, clever, willing to persevere and take risks.

My younger self probably wouldn’t have articulated it in this way.  But Menolly went on an adventure to become a musician, and ended up with 9 pet mini-dragons along the way.  What wasn’t to like??

She might not have picked up a sword and gone off to battle, but she taught us how to be brave for the sake of our art.  And she also taught us to remember to be kind along the way.

It’s always important to be kind.