Old friends, old ghosts
Dec. 15th, 2010 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaunthieAs most of you know, I'm a voracious reader, and I have been since I was very, very small. Pretty much from the time I figured out how to read, in fact. Not terribly surprisingly, I have books that are old friends. They're comfort reads. They're old favorites, sometimes not read for years. And they are full of old ghosts, of memories of the first time I became a fan of this particular character or meme or plot type or author or universe - or combinations of some or all of them. They also hold the memories of the first time I read them, the edition of the book, the chair or couch or bed or wherever I sat reading them, the smell of the pages even. And often I fall in love all over again, or at least get a warm glow.
Today's example? Sherlock Holmes. I hadn't revisited these stories in a while, not until recently. But it didn't take me long to remember just how much I loved these stories as a child, and how much I still love them today. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were two of my early loves, two of the characters that I invented further stories for in my head and wanted to go adventuring with along with Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel and various TV characters. (There was nothing romantic about these stories, mind you; for one thing, I was maybe seven or eight at most, and for another, Mr. Holmes disapproved of emotions.) And I remember the edition (Readers' Digest Condensed Classics hardback, which contained an abbreviated collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (The Adventures, I think) along with three other novels), and the cheap metallic smell of the gilding of the pages and the lettering on the spine, and sitting curled up in the brown leather barrel-chair with my legs over one side, absorbing these stories under the yellow incandescent light of the 60-watt bulb in the old brass lamp (which added yet more hot metallic smell when it had been on for a while).
Today I have the collected works in a two paperback set, plus the files from gutenberg.org cluttering up at least one of my hard drives. They are of course far more complete than the old Reader's Digest collection from so long ago. And although these versions do not have the nostalgia of that first collection, I love them and the stories they contain nearly as much as my child-self did. Yes, I can see the dated qualities of some of the writing now, and my mind makes note of some of the inconsistencies between the stories in a way that I never tracked as a kid. But I love these characters, and I love their world, and gods help me but my brain *still* concocts new stories around them if I give it the chance.
Part of me will always be seven years old when it comes to Holmes and Watson, I think. The same is true for other literary characters from my childhood. Some of them I've outgrown, but others I don't think I ever will.
What about you? What old friends, old ghosts, haunt your brain-attic?
Today's example? Sherlock Holmes. I hadn't revisited these stories in a while, not until recently. But it didn't take me long to remember just how much I loved these stories as a child, and how much I still love them today. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were two of my early loves, two of the characters that I invented further stories for in my head and wanted to go adventuring with along with Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel and various TV characters. (There was nothing romantic about these stories, mind you; for one thing, I was maybe seven or eight at most, and for another, Mr. Holmes disapproved of emotions.) And I remember the edition (Readers' Digest Condensed Classics hardback, which contained an abbreviated collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (The Adventures, I think) along with three other novels), and the cheap metallic smell of the gilding of the pages and the lettering on the spine, and sitting curled up in the brown leather barrel-chair with my legs over one side, absorbing these stories under the yellow incandescent light of the 60-watt bulb in the old brass lamp (which added yet more hot metallic smell when it had been on for a while).
Today I have the collected works in a two paperback set, plus the files from gutenberg.org cluttering up at least one of my hard drives. They are of course far more complete than the old Reader's Digest collection from so long ago. And although these versions do not have the nostalgia of that first collection, I love them and the stories they contain nearly as much as my child-self did. Yes, I can see the dated qualities of some of the writing now, and my mind makes note of some of the inconsistencies between the stories in a way that I never tracked as a kid. But I love these characters, and I love their world, and gods help me but my brain *still* concocts new stories around them if I give it the chance.
Part of me will always be seven years old when it comes to Holmes and Watson, I think. The same is true for other literary characters from my childhood. Some of them I've outgrown, but others I don't think I ever will.
What about you? What old friends, old ghosts, haunt your brain-attic?
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Date: 2010-12-16 09:35 pm (UTC)I think it's past time to reread A Wrinkle in Time, too. Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace. Yeah. Need to dig out one of my copies of that sometime soon.