Jill Murray

Just Read:

<sigh>Another one down.</sigh>

Have I ever explained how A Series of Unfortunate Events, specifically book 3, The Reptile Room, is singlehandedly responsible for my re-entry into fiction following one very long and very dark decade?

If Daniel Handler ever Googles himself, he should be especially proud of this post because between the ages of 14 and 23 I read nothing but non-fiction, plays and the occasional Charles Addams cartoon. And by a lot, I mean A LOT of non-fiction and plays– enough that I spent virtually every spare moment in the library, which should give you some kind of idea of how fun and popular my peers found me to be throughout my “teenage” years as they are wont to be called, as if that is an age at all and not some boundless, shapeless purgatory between quitting my paper route and scraping together enough cash and ambition to move out of my mother’s house.

True, I buried myself under a pile of microfiche and a stack of overdue fines long enough to buy new curtains for my high school library because I was interested in the world around me and obsessively curious about The Stage and the place of all the men and women upon and behind it. But more so, I had lost the path of fiction somewhere between the ages of 11 and 14, and knew not where to pick it up again.

Mr. Handler himself speaks of a similarly wayward age– one where his own book bag was inexplicably filled with old copies of V.C. Andrews and Stephen King novels– the classic dead end of teenage literacy. (No offence to Stephen King, but dude, kids who read your books tend not to be interested in anything else.)

I went through an Andrews phase as well. What else could I do? One moment, everyone was writing books for me about every topic under the sun. I had my Cleary, my Blume, my Korman, my Lowry, my Korman again and again, and then, oops, pow surprise, suddenly embarassed by the tiny-chairs-and-tables section of the library, but not old enough for an adult card that would grant me access to the big-tables-and-chairs section of the library, I was rudely annexed like so many before me to the let’s- pretend- these- couches- are- comfy- and- we- can- ‘hang’- here- as- long- as- we- make- no- noise/ let’s- talk- about- sex- and- violence- and- drugs- and- nothing- else- except- maybe- the- scourges- of- racism- and- child- porn,- OK- Captain- Obvious-? section of the libarary.

Listen up, people of Earth: No one wants to read about how everyone gets both pregnant and AIDS the very first time they have sex, even after taking appropriate precautions. Bookish kids don’t give a crap about football hero Timmy’s secret gay identity and how it plays into his need to Win the Softball Game. Every adolescent is not at risk of going all Columbine on your ass. We are not all raped and abused. We do not all struggle with Becoming a Woman or Man. Most of us, even the ones who wear black, are actually pretty lucky overall and do not struggle with alcohol abuse or a Drug Problem.

In short, people like to be spoken to as people, not as potential-desperate-head-cases-in-need-of-saving, regardless of their chronological age. Voyeurs that we are, we want to see people’s lives and ideas drawn out as stories, not warnings.

After my two years in exile, I just lost the fictive thread. I can count on my hands all the fiction I read between 1992 and 2000.

• The entire canon of Douglas Adams, including Last Chance to See and the Dirk Gently books.
• One Christopher Pike novel, involving angels, souls, scuba diving and a dentist’s daughter, found on the floor and read on the floor with Irene Montgomery, backstage during two performances of The King And I. (We were in the Wives’ Chorus– ping! 2-3-4…)
• Zadig and Candide by Voltaire, under my desk in Geography class, History and sometimes Economics
• L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être by Milan Kundera, on the bus to and from summer school, having failed grade 10 Math by accident.
• In class: some of A Tale of Two Cities, bits and pieces of Pride and Prejudice, all of Timothy Findley’s The Wars, all of Of Mice and Men but only the first half of The Grapes of Wrath, the first chapter of Evelyn Waugh’s Officers & Gentlemen, and The Wars, again, maybe five times.
• A whole bunch of Kurt Vonnegut, starting with Breakfast of Champions, which my classmates described as “hilarious” but which struck me as one of the saddest novels of all time and made me cry.
• The Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig, first because it was a stage musical and then because it rocks something fierce
• Fanfan by je m’rappelle plus qui… a friend passed it on to me

So, stragely unbalanced yet mostly quality– the fiction of a reader lost in a desert or maybe trapped in a high-end snow globe.

Then one day I was killing time before seeing some movie (Could it be, it was Bridget Jones diary? I bet it was.) at the Silver City at Yonge & Eglinton, I wandered into the big bad Indigo that’s there and wafted up the stairs, at the top of which was The Reptile Room. And the little perfect, eccentrically bound and illustrated object just sang my name from across the room. It was the book that was missing all along. Like if I had had the book when I was a “Ten up” reader, my life would have been different and now that I had found the missing piece, I could finish the puzzle and continue on as intended, course corrected.

So I read all the rest of them, and then went online and followed an internet trail, not to stalk Mr. Handler but to find out who he was and whether he could lead me to more books. And he did. And what I have to show for it now, other than the ever changing and often frustrating focus and structure of my whole entire day-to-day life, is a row of perfect, eccentrically bound Unfortunate Events books. I buy them the day they come out and read them without cracking the spines, and the only one I share with anyone is the Reptile Room, because I have two copies, one for me and one for lending and getting sticky.

As a rule, I HATE to do this with books but some day when I have kids of my own, I’m going to keep those books on the highest shelf I have, and tell said kids “don’t touch mommy’s books.” And I’ll send them to the library instead.