By onestormynight
Digital delivery
I tend to riff off the given example so here goes another:
I didn't love The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I tried to read it on bus rides to and from work so maybe that's why. I must have one of those attention spans that requires a book has an immediate hook and continues as an engrossing page turner - the kind of interest that has me reading right through lunch though I might pause in mid-chew when I came to something especially thrilling.
Hitchhiker's Guide was too tedious. I couldn't quite grasp the storyline and I didn't understand the characters let alone care about them. It happened to be one of the few books I was able to download to my eReader at the time.
It also competed in my personal childhood reading experiences with the likes of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. It's a classic award winner among other classic friend adventures featuring other world's and dimensions, and magic.
Other such examples I read were The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, Mio My Son by Astrid Lindgren, and The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron. What child could resist a story that starts out with a boy perusing the newspaper (most likely for the comics and Dear Abby) and spotting a small Help Wanted ad written in a mysterious green ink?
All these stories include some hardship or battle in childhood that must be overcome and usually, in no small way, with the help of friends who've come along for the journey or who are met along the way. It's no wonder that Hitchhiker's Guide couldn't compete when I finally attempted to read it as an adult. (I also read Harry Potter as an adult and watched movies based on the books long after my daughters had outgrown them.)
One other of such "childhood adventure" stories I read as an adult still haunts me. I found Clive Barker's Thief of Always pretty horrifying though there were no saws, no blood or guts, no gore. Just the kind of terror that comes of boredom on a rainy day and a willingness to be lured and entertained by something just beyond understanding.
The youth in the story is primarily alone and fighting against forces that challenge him with mind-bending, shapeshifting and time warping power. He is blind, deaf, and dumb to his opposers' devices and his only defense is the happiness and joy he has experienced and understood in his short life.
I guess this is just a 500-word summary of a few of my more memorable childhood reading experiences as a child and and for better or worse, as an adult. It's like my days working at an art museum with the local schools and trying to sound bite the various art concepts like line, shape, color, light and dark, perspective, mood, subject - and make them interesting to nine and 10-year olds.
It all comes down to my early conviction that the right combination of words could change the world. Being deaf and blind, I have only my wits and words to go on.
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