Mmm...books...

There is something so satisfying about discussing books with someone, especially books you love. The expression "shared joy is increased" is totally true when it comes to sifting through the details of a story that someone else loves the book just as much as you do.

Even better, is when you have a book that you love and reread so often that the colors of the cover are duller than when you bought it new (because who uses dust jackets anyway; they just get torn!), the pages are softer, and you remember that time you were eating spaghetti while reading that left a tiny spot of sauce on the lower right corner of page 49. (Mmm, that was good spaghetti...)

I was on the bus this morning on my way to work, and saw the woman across from me reading The Giver by Lois Lowry. It's one of my favorite books, but one of the saddest I've ever read. She wasn't very far along in the book, maybe the first twenty pages, but I glanced at her between penning answers to the morning's Sudoku to see if her face revealed any hint of awe or puzzlement. I saw nothing but a slight frown as she digested what was happening to Jonas. I hope she enjoys the book.

I feel the same way when I read passages aloud to my husband from various Harry Potter books (he maintains that, between seeing the movies and hearing me recite pages upon pages, he doesn't need to actually read them now) or books written by one of my favorite authors, Diana Gabaldon. I just love watching the look on people's faces, or hearing their gasps, laughter or exclamations when they read a certain passage or hear it for the first time.

I speed read. I always have. My nickname in second grade was Speedy Reader (or Shorty, depending on who you talked to). It maybe stems from my unfailing need to know how something ends - I need to know right now! So I tear through a book, grabbing the essentials and missing out on some of the details. But I need the details. So I read it again.

And again.

And again.

Until I'm talking to someone about the book and say, "Oh, remember when this character said..." then I repeat the text word for word, and they look at me blankly and ask, "How many times have you read this?" "Um, thirty-five times, why?"

I get a lot of head shakes after this.

The thing is that I pick a book apart like it's a tangled ball of a hundred pieces of string; I ruthlessly pull and yank at story elements, stopping occasionally to unravel a knot of information, until I have a nice collection of straight, unknotted pieces of story, which I bundle carefully back up to make a nice tidy yarn again. It is so tremendously satisfying.

Anyone who knows me even a little bit know I'm a huge fan of the Harry Potter series. But it's because of the details. Seemingly innocuous tidbits play a huge part in later books. When talking about this to people, I frequently mention the example of the Vanishing Cabinet.

In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second book in the series, the caretaker's cat is Petrified. This makes the caretaker, Filch, dole out extra punishements in his misery. On his way back to the dorm after a rainy and muddy Quidditch practice, Harry is talking to a ghost, then gets caught by Filch for dirtying the floors. Just before assigning punishment, they are interrupted by a loud crash above them. The ghost convinced the school's poltergeist to topple over the Vanishing Cabinet on the second floor to distract the caretaker. The Cabinet is broken.

In the fifth book, the school is in the clutches of a maniacal Headmistress who creates the Inquisitorial Squad, students who have the same authority to punish students that teachers have. Friends of Harry's stop a member of the Inquisitorial Squad from taking points away by shoving him into the broken Vanishing Cabinet. The member of the Inquisitorial Squad reappears, disoriented and confused, after several weeks.

In the sixth book, Harry's school nemesis, Draco Malfoy, finds out that the Cabinet is actually one of a pair which, when fixed, would actually create a passageway between them. Harry, in the meantime, only comes across the Cabinet again in passing, finding it in a hidden room with other broken magical objects, where he needs to hide a book. Draco later fixes the Cabinet, and uses it to allow Death Eaters to take over the school.

See? Who would have thought (besides the author, natch) that a simple cabinet, mentioned casually as a tool to avoid detention, would turn out to be integral to the takeover of Hogwarts? Rowling does this over and over throughout the series. And I simply looooove reading them again and again to pick up on the little details that turn a simple story into a wonderful saga. And even better, is unraveling these threads with someone else.