Adult-Level Reading
Welcome to another post. This one is about how I discovered a new way to enjoy reading, and it’s all thanks to the pandemic. Among efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19, almost all live events were (as you know) canceled for the bulk of 2020, including (as you may not know) the annual Bay Area Christmastime favorite, the Dickens Fair.
For those who don’t know, a sixty-word summary: The Dickens Fair is where you pay to go inside a cavernous building that is made up to feel like you are outdoors among many small buildings. People are dressed and act like they’re in the throes of celebrating Christmas in mid-19th century London. It is a raucous cavalcade of facades and characters and one of my favorite Christmastime activities.
I was sad to have to skip it. I’ve only been to the thing like five times my entire life. But I always tell myself I’m going to go in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and this year I was deprived of even that small fiction. I was sad to have to skip it. When I don’t go to things, I like it to be my choice.
So, faced with a decidedly Dickensian dearth of Dickens in fair form, I decided to treat myself to some Dickens in book form. But in the spirit of the fair, I visited upon myself three (3!) books that are, while inspired by the man, the product of someone else’s imagination.
These are those books.
The first, “The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits,” was very fact-based (so many publishing details!), covering most of Dickens’ life but focusing mainly on his writing “A Christmas Carol.” It was a quick read and pulled me in as soon as I picked it up.
The second, “Mr. Dickens and His Carol: A Novel,” is, as noted in its title, a work of fiction. But it was based on a collection of facts (which I’d just learned days earlier!), weaving true things together to create a beautiful little origin myth for one of his most famous stories.
The last, “Geronimo Stilton Classic Tales: A Christmas Carol,” is a retelling of that story. It features anthropomorphized mice as all the characters and I highly recommend reading it if you are a child and/or enjoy reading books aloud to (other) children.
But I’m not here to talk about the books I read!
I’m here to recommend the step that came before. The choice to match my reading to what was happening in the real world and to pick a few titles that seemed like they’d blend well together. Because while I enjoyed these books individually, I particularly enjoyed the whole experience of reading them at the time of year I read them in and in reading them in succession.
I mean, sure I’ve put down or picked up titles because of a mood. Usually putting down. Or in the case of Robinson Crusoe, thrown across a bathroom to be left behind a hamper for a month. (I can be a fickle little stinker!) But I’m talking about making it go the other way and choosing titles to engender a particular vibe. Taking control!
The pieces were always there (and it could have come together in at least three different ways for me: as a Christmas paraphernalia lover,* a parent,† or as a bookworm,‡ but somehow I’ve never done it before. Never really read with much intentionality outside a classroom. I never thought of it as being for me, if it ever even occurred to me. Like when you’re a kid and an ad for something fancy like Disney World or the Red Lobster comes on TV. You understand it’s not for you. It’s for someone else, someone with a family more together (figuratively, literally, or both) than yours.
Luckily for me, I turned out to be a hot-weather-hating vegan with a disdain for crowds (since before it was cool), so I don’t feel left out being left out of the seafood restaurants and amusement parks of the world. But this not-so-fancy thing of being a little more thoughtful in this particular way? Being a little more (and I hesitate to use this word but it’s really the most accurate) proactive in my reading habits? This could be for me. Maybe it always was.
I keep sitting on this because I think I ought to have something more to say, but I don’t (seem to) and maybe that’s (just gonna have to be) okay. I just liked the experience and wanted to talk about it for a minute. Have you had any reading revelations? Any recommendations for book combinations? Let me (and whoever else might read this!) know, below the footnotes, in the comments!
*I was already into the lights and decorations, clothes and jewelry, TV specials and music, claps and traps. I love all the basics. All the intentionality. So why not Christmas books? And by extension, any other kind of books?
†I have children and so have become a well-practiced intentional book-obtainer over the past decade and gotten pretty good at finding the appropriate books for the needs (doctor visits, first days of school, etc.), wants, and whims of my daughters and son. By why did that effort never seem to get self-applied?
‡I do read a lot. Or read what the average person would think of as “a lot,” anyway (though probably not as much as you, deer reader). But I always had a laissez-faire attitude towards reading, and in part that’s because my identity as a book nerd was expressed by obtaining books as much as anything else. Why not be more thoughtful about my choices?
