The purpose of this series is to describe books loved at a certain point in a reader’s life, but there’s one book I’ve fallen for many, many times.  It’s called Anagrams, by Lorrie Moore, and here’s a sampling of occasions when you’ll want to crack it open.

1. When you’re feeling schizophrenic.

Anagrams concerns the lives of Benna, a nightclub singer, Gerard, a wimpy and admiring neighbor, and Eleanor, a witty friend.  Except for when Gerard is a noncommittal stud.  Or when Eleanor is trashy and selling crates of halter tops.  Or when Benna is actually an aerobics instructor for old people.  Or a first grade teacher.  Or cracking a bottle of ketchup over her best friend’s skull.

Across five short stories Moore plays with three characters’ lives, switching their tastes and personalities like somebody trying on shirts.  They are anagrams of one another. What happens, the book seems to ask, When a character goes from brassy to meek?  What happens when Benna gets angry, or even angrier than that?  Are these really different characters we’re talking about, or don’t we all contain many lives and longings?

2. When you’re planning a yard sale.

Some items you can buy at Benna and Gerard and Eleanor’s: foam rubber curlers with hairs stuck in them, two bags of fiberglass insulation, three seamed and greasy juice glasses, and an opened box of Frost ‘N Tip for Brunettes Only with two coffee cup rings on the front.

3. When you’re drinking beer for breakfast.

Benna does it, as does Gerard.  You’ll have company.

4. When you want to hear some hokey jokes.

Especially from a lounge singer.  In this book, you have your choice: Benna or Gerard, depending on the story.

Good evening, ladies and gentlespoons.  Welcome to the Dome Room.  Where’s the dome in this room?  What a dome name.  I’m Gerard Maines.  I know some of you were expecting Tammy Wynette, but these things happen.  Hey you, Eleanor!  You in the back, doing my taxes!  This one’s for you.

5. When you’re having roommate problems.

Though Benna and Gerald are dating, they move into apartments across the hall from each other.

“It’s like parallel universes,” says Benna.  “It’s like sleeping in twin beds.”

“It’s like Delmar, Maryland,” says Eleanor, “which is the same as Delmar, Delaware.”

“It’s living flush up against rejection.”

“It’s so like Gerard,” says Eleanor.  “That man lives across the hall from his own fucking heart.”

6. When your best friend is having an affair with your boyfriend.

Such is the moment when Benna whips out that ketchup bottle.

7. When you’ve learned a thing or two about cancer.

In one story Benna finds a lump in her breast.  This is going to sound bad, but I laughed more in these passages than in any other.  I also wanted to weep.  Says Benna:

This is why I was pleased: The lump was not simply a focal point for my self-pity; it was also a battery propelling me, strengthening me—my very own appointment with death.  It anchored and deepened me like a secret.  I started to feel it when I walked, just out from under my armpit—hard, achy evidence that I was truly a knotted saint, a bleeding angel.  At last it had been confirmed: My life was really as difficult as I had always suspected.

8. When you’re playing word games.

“Things flow about so here!” says Lewis Carroll in one epigraph.  “Everyone says to stay away from ants,” says Lewis Thomas in another.  “And—you say to yourself—what’s the harm?” says Jerry Lewis.  What is up with the Lewises?  That’s for you figure out.

9. When you want a child.

In the last story the narrator claims she has an imaginary daughter: Georgianne Michelle Carpenter.  She is six years old and “watches too much TV news.”  For fifty thrilling pages you’ll understand this little girl more richly and hilariously than your own niece, perhaps even forgetting that she is only somebody’s wish.

10. When you want to feel alive.

This last one is cheesy.  But I’m telling you—it works.

I moved back to New York City in 2007 after an absence of five years. Shortly after my arrival, during one particularly bad insomniac fugue, I noticed The Pushcart War sitting forgotten on a distant shelf in my room, a relic of my elementary school reading days. I devoured it anew in about two hours. A few months ago, I read it again. I loved this book when I first read it in fourth grade, I loved it in 2007 and I love it now.

Its enduring appeal has much to do with what it means to me as a New Yorker. The Pushcart War is one of the quintessential New York books in children’s literature, on a par with Stuart Little and The Cricket in Times Square, doing for my hometown what Madeline does for Paris and Make Way for Ducklings does for Boston. It meant a lot to a 9-year-old just beginning to make sense of the city’s stew of sights and experiences and also to a 22-year-old finding that his city had changed a lot during an extended absence.

The New York that Jean Merrill presents is one easily familiar to its inhabitants, both in 1964 when it was originally published and even now. It is a polyglot, multicultural city, a bustling conurbation filled with colorful characters and encounters, many based at real locations around Manhattan, from the Upper West Side to Little Italy. It’s a place filled with cranks and raconteurs and folks with names like Morris the Florist, Harry the Hot Dog, Moe Mammoth, General Anna, Papa Peretz, Harry the Hot Dog and Mr. Jerusalem.

The dialogue is flawlessly infected by New Yorkese. “Tomatoes all over the street, and twenty pushcart peddlers yelling at the truck driver, and picking up broken tomatoes and throwing them at him. What kind of working conditions are those?” the aforementioned Moe Mammoth says to a journalist early in the book, and one can almost heart the indignant Brooklyn snarl in his voice. The same goes for the Pushcart King, Maxie Hammerman, whose put-upon sense of aggrieved injury feels like the constant kvetching of an old Yiddish grandpa. “Why not?” he asks at one point. “In my line I have to know a lot of people. Should I be the Pushcart King for nothing?”

So the city is an excitable, frenzied, at times bilious environment, but for the most part friendship and politeness rule the day, which somehow contrasts comfortably with the titular war and the general brash nature of New York. But what exactly is this war, anyway, and what is it doing in a children’s book? Without the plot, The Pushcart War is simply a nicely observed urban study done with colorful touches for children. The war tosses on a giant dollop of irony and makes the whole recipe a delicious mix of the kid lit and worldly themes—in other words, a serious satire for the elementary school set.

Consider the first chapter’s opening paragraph (after a faux preface by Merrill introducing the story as a true one and her book as a work of history): “The Pushcart War started on the afternoon of March 15, 1986, when a truck ran down a pushcart belonging to a flower peddler. Daffodils were scattered all over the street. The pushcart was flattened, and the owner of the pushcart was pitched headfirst into a pickle barrel.”

(Despite being published in 1964, this book was not set in the future. The dates are updated with every new printing by the publisher, perhaps to give children a sense of the recent past.)

Chapter titles include “The Pea Shooter Campaign – Phase 1,” “The Pea Blockade,” “The Barricade at Posey’s Plant” and “The Battle of Bleecker Street.” The martial tone of the book, in other words, is unmistakable. The story concerns a fight for the streets and soul of New York City between the evil trucking companies that want to hog the streets and the humble pushcart merchants who represent thrift, industry and good citizenship. The satire, though I didn’t recognize it while reading The Pushcart War in fourth grade, is of the Vietnam War, with the conflict between the imperial thugs and the feisty guerillas transposed to a local setting. Throw in a corrupt government and snide depictions of politicians (the mayor, at one point, substitutes a “potato platform“ for his original “peanut butter platform“ in order to get reelected), and the result could be quite an anarchic stew.

This could be a scenario for overwrought moralizing and hackneyed prose, but Merrill keeps the tone light and the antics convivial. Though weapons are used and violence witnessed, there are no casualties and few major injuries. This is a book, after all, with all sorts of silliness, where kids start nicknaming each daffodil and hyacinth after the arrest of Frank the Flower; the President of the United States slyly tells a journalist, “Don’t be a truck”; a woman smuggles a message into prison that asks, “How is the blister on your thumb?”; the war’s final battle turns into a cantaloupe-throwing frenzy; and, of course, a man get pitched into pickle barrels.

It’s a lot of fun, and it feels just like New York.

I loved To Kill a Mockingbird when I was twelve years old. I read it for the same reason most twelve-year-olds do: it’s standard fare in middle-school literature classes. A compelling look at the south pre-Civil-Rights, it focused enough on outsiderness to trick my nerdy twelve-year-old self into believing it was just as interesting as the X-Men comics filling my bookshelves. Because, you know, they were the bar for judgment, not that silly Pulitzer Prize nonsense.

I just plain skipped school for most of seventh grade, feigning migraines to get out of going to the mid-sized North Georgian junior high that I despised. As a result, I was “homeschooled” for eighth, which generally meant my parents left me alone in the house with an Algebra 2 textbook and a mail-order encyclopedia on world history. My father would suggest books for me to read, ranging from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Stranger. We didn’t really have a system in place for judging my reading comprehension; instead, my parents, both math types, liked to regale me with stories of their own high school English classes, where they read the first and last chapters of books and nothing else. (Note that I believe these tactics are generally frowned upon by serious homeschoolers.)

My father thought I’d like To Kill a Mockingbird. Because of our demanding educational standards, I only remember bits and pieces of the novel from this period of my life, but it did leave me with the general sense that it was The Best Book of All Time. It had all the great characteristics that my favorite comics had, including children thrown into adult situations way beyond what their peers had to deal with (the anti-mutant sentiments of X-Men are based on racism), an older male mentor figure (Atticus Finch and Professor X would be BFF in a merged universe), a cast whose clearly superior morals made them outcasts (okay, so depending on which era of X-Men you read, this was debatable, but I was still pretty entrenched in the cartoon version on Fox Kids).

Recently, I decided to revisit To Kill a Mockingbird to see if it lived up to my vague memories. It turns out the story twelve-year-old Kat remembered isn’t the same as the one that I read as an adult. And no, I don’t mean that I’ve picked up on more sophisticated themes than my younger self could (although that’s true as well.) For some reason, I remembered this book as including a lot of kooky shenanigans with Scout, her older brother, and their creepy-but-misunderstood buddy, Boo Radley. It took me until about halfway in this time through to realize Boo is not, in fact, an active character for the majority of the tale. Instead, there’s some geek named Dill who dresses oddly and spews a lot of tall tales, and there’s a hell of a lot more about their father’s trial than the scenes in court.

At the time, I was engaged by the larger story of the novel: right versus wrong, racism in the South, etc. Rereading it now, I’m engaged more by the finer brushstrokes in the story: the changes in Jem’s character as he ages, the clear ambivalence on Aunt Alexandria’s part, the way Walter Cunningham’s father wavers pre-lynching when he realizes Scout is in school with his own son.

More specifically, I think the difference in my reading focus lies in the fact that Atticus Finch is a Good character. As a child, his Goodness was easy for me to latch onto—the same way it’s easy to fall for Harry Potter or Superman. This man is seemingly without fault: he’s smart, he treats everyone fairly—even the recluse next-door neighbor who may or may not have stabbed his father’s leg with a pair of scissors—and he abhors guns, despite being the sharpest shooter in the county.

The excitement of the story was watching him try to fight The Bad Guy—in this case, the Ewells and the inferior morals they represented—and the scenes that stuck out in my mind were the ones that supported this vision of a world with Good Guys and Bad Guys: I don’t remember games the children played that indirectly tormented the Radleys, just the goodies Boo left for them in the tree outside his house; I don’t remember Scout trying to deal with the other children’s taunts in the schoolyard and her misunderstanding of the meaning of their ridicule, just that the rest of the town was racist and the Finch family was not; I don’t remember all of Atticus’ interactions with the other townspeople leading up to the courtroom, just the case itself, and that Tom Robinson had clearly not committed the crime he was accused of.

As an adult, it’s nice to believe such characters exist, but I think that the aspect of To Kill a Mockingbird that makes it so compelling is that Atticus’ existence forces the other characters, with their weaknesses and strengths, to grapple with their own beliefs. The portrait of him painted by his daughter is, essentially, without human error. Were the story focused on him alone, it would probably be too flat to feel realistic. Instead of simply being a story about good versus evil, it’s a story about how average people deal with moral decisions.

Sadly, the VHS tapes of the X-Men cartoon didn’t have as much replay value.

Fantasy. After three years of grinding out an MFA, and reading all the literature that entails, a fantasy book reinvigorated my passion for books. The concept behind “I Loved This Book When…” must have already been knocking around in my head when I came down with pneumonia this spring.

Pneumonia. An old man’s disease. Lying in a hospital bed, an asthmatic just trying to breathe, I found the situation almost laughable. Like when my wife broke her hip two summers ago. An old woman’s debilitation. What are the odds? I thought. But that’s just the kind of lucky couple we are.

In the hospital there wasn’t much to do except read. I could have turned to any number of books. Or I could have re-read the last book I finished prior to attending graduate school: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. It would’ve been a kind of book-end to the experience for a middle-aged man now three years older.

Instead of Joyce, I chose Roger Zelazny’s Great Book of Amber: a 1,200 plus paged behemoth of a book that contains all ten novels of a series. Heavy and cumbersome, the base of the spine dug through my Johnny and into my gut as I settled in to read the first novel: Nine Princes In Amber.

There are very few books I can say that I truly love, which is sad because I am fairly well-read.  Though I confess that after finishing a truly remarkable book I sometimes bestow a kiss on the back cover. But I can think of no other book than this that has hit me quite so hard at two very different times in my life.

Amber is the one true city from which all other places exist. All other planes of existence, including our Earth, are but a derivative of Amber. In Zelazny’s world, these planes are referred to as Shadows. The further one travels in Shadow, the greater the difference between that world and Amber. The Shadows stretch across space and time until all sense of order and “reality” lead to Chaos. In Nine Princes in Amber, Zelazny plants the seed for the main conflict in the series: the Order of Amber versus the Courts of Chaos.

While Amber itself is a pure ideal, the politics at work in Amber are Machiavellian. Oberon, the true King of Amber, has mysteriously disappeared. It is unclear if he has simply abdicated the throne. He has been absent for so long that he is considered dead, lost, captured–never coming back. His absence sparks a bitter battle among his offspring to determine who will seize the throne.

Nine Princes in Amber is told from the perspective of one of the princes, Corwin. At the beginning of the novel we find Corwin in a mental hospital on Earth, suffering from amnesia. He is unaware of the political upheaval at work in Amber. At first he is unaware of his true identity as a Prince of Amber, a being who possesses talents and strengths beyond the reach of any human. As a child of Oberon, he has the natural ability to manipulate existence to travel through Shadow.

Corwin gradually regains his identity and his memory. Zelazny does a terrific job of teasing out the mystery about Corwin’s memory loss. It is over the course of the first five books in the series that we learn he had been living on Earth and suffering from amnesia for centuries. A faction among the siblings arranged for Corwin to remain “exiled” on Earth while they planned to install their choice in the battle of succession.

I loved this book when I was a kid. I recall sitting out on the wall surrounding my friend’s parents’ garden and earnestly discussing the series. We’d talk for hours about all of the characters and their powers and desires; the plots and schemes at work; the possible machinations that might be in store in the next installment in the series; and marvel at the powers at work in the world of Amber.

I still find many elements to admire. First of all, this series thwarts convention. Corwin is not a typical hero. In many ways he is an anti-hero. In fact, he is often a bastard; he’s governed by survival and cunning; he’s not above trickery and deceit. He finds the notion of “playing fair” when his life is on the line idiotic. But his stay on Earth has tempered Corwin’s nature.

Unlike the typical hero, Corwin does not possess an undeniable, near mythic level of justification for his “rightful place”. There is no destiny at work. Corwin is simply governed by ambition. He needs the throne, he must have it, and he will not suffer anything or anyone standing in his way. As a writer, I appreciate this quality in his character even more. Good characters must have desire. Here, in this fantasy novel, we have a character that wants, and he often pays a price for his ambition.

Since I read The Chronicles at an early age, I wasn’t able to appreciate the various subversions at work. I simply accepted Zelazny’s approach as the norm. As I grew older and the patterns of convention became apparent, perhaps my early encounter with Zelazny helped fuel the fire that caused, and still causes, me to rail against convention. Thanks to Zelazny, I am doomed to appreciate the anti-hero. But I have no regrets.

The writing is clean, solid prose. There is nothing fancy at work in terms of style and the level of the writing certainly would not be considered literary. However, the principals at work governing the universe of Amber: Order, Chaos, existence, time, space, physics, metaphysics, etc. get quite complicated and Zelazny does a good job of describing them clearly. The originality and complexity of Zelazny’s fantasy is something I have found, and continue to find, much more compelling than any typical fantasy series. A winner of six Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards, Zelazny was no slouch.

There are certainly many faults with the Chronicles. Some of the characters are rather flat. The Chronicles of Amber are written for young adults, particularly boys. Corwin’s encounters with women are sexist, and generally the daughters of Oberon are summarily dismissed as threats for taking the throne. When I first read the series I wasn’t aware of these aspects, but now I certainly am.

As a child, I loved the complications and the scheming. Zelazny was able to establish a mystery that remained fresh and exciting throughout the entire Chronicles. After revisiting it I recognize that the manipulations aren’t terribly complex, or maybe I now lack the imagination I once had which could once create so many possibilities for Corwin that there was an illusion of complexity. Regardless, three decades later the excitement is still there for me. Sitting in that hospital bed, I found myself smiling through numerous passages.

I looked forward to the moments every day when I would pick up the book and see where I left off. It was exciting. I wanted to re-write it and maybe edit out the material I didn’t like, reshape it on a “higher” level. I know, talk about ego! But I couldn’t help myself from feeling this way. I checked to see if Zelazny had written anything new. I discovered he’d died in 1995. Were there others writing about the world Zelazny had created? I checked. There were, however they were out of print. But I was not dissuaded, and I still just might look into pursuing the world of Amber as a future writing opportunity.

There was a process at work within me as I read Nine Princes of Amber. I realized that for so long I had been reading dispassionately. Somewhere in the course of my studies I had lost the thrill. I had arrived at a point where I was unable to shut off my critical eye, to simply enjoy a story, more simply, to relax. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy a single story I read as a graduate student. I did, but they were few and far between.

During my graduate studies, I met more than a couple of students who were working on young adult fiction or fantasy/sci-fi. My first reaction was to laugh. What a joke, I thought. Emerson was a place for serious writers, for those striving for literary merit. Not a place for monsters, or swords, or super-heroes. Right? If one wanted to pursue genre fiction, one should simply write their damn novel and be done with it. Join a book group. Have some friends read it. Then try to get it published. If one really needed any help beyond staying abreast of the latest trends in convention, enroll in an adult education class, not an MFA program! What a waste of time. Time spent meeting degree requirements was time away from writing.

Why was I reacting this way? If I truly dismissed this work wouldn’t I simply just reject it and move on, rather than come up with a litany of justifications? I realized the reason why I reacted so strongly was because I actually cared about what my colleagues were attempting, and that I admired their efforts.

After I finished Nine Princes in Amber I found a fantasy novel I had written in the early nineties. It was unfinished and it would require a significant amount of work to revisit it and resurrect it. I’d always planned on writing a fantasy novel. But I had wanted to first master the craft, establish myself as a serious writer and then, later in life, write the type of fantasy novel that had originally sparked my passion for reading. What ego!

I decided I’m not going to wait to write to my interests. Two outlines for novels immediately came to me. I’m busy writing one of them. Maybe they will never be considered high art, maybe they will never be considered literature, maybe they will be an object of ridicule to those that are looking for an elevated form. But I’m bringing what I can to my writing. I’m writing and reading with renewed passion. I am still critical but I am not allowing my criticism to dull my enjoyment. Quite simply Nine Princes In Amber has reinvigorated me. And that is why I love this book.

What follows is a sentence that nobody has written before, ever*:

Every time I hear Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting,” I think of Johnny Tremain.

When first presented with the phrase “I loved this book when,” my mind went straight to childhood. (As it usually does, being a not-ready-for-primetime adult.) I read a ton as a kid—the complete Hardy Boys, about 40% of Matt Christopher’s (100+) sports novels, the occasional Sweet Valley High, when I became curious about girls. But when I think of childhood books, Johnny Tremain marches straight to the front.

I reread it last week, and from the very first line—“On rocky islands gulls woke”—I knew this post would be based on a false premise: that I loved this book only at a specific time in my life. It’s just not true. I loved it as a child, I love it now, and I will always love it. In fact, if I hadn’t read Johnny Tremain, my life would probably look a lot different than it does now.

* * *

Richard Marx’s earth-shattering album Repeat Offender came out in May of 1989, and the singles were all over the radio. I was eleven, lying in the “way way back” of the family’s low-top conversion van on our way to St. Louis for a family reunion. Cilla Lapham had just given Johnny Tremain an apple to express her affections, while citizens all around Boston were gearing up for the coming revolution. I can’t remember if this was the first time I’d read the book, but it is the first time I can remember being riveted by something, anything.

Then “Right Here Waiting” came on the radio, and I was torn. I was at a key point in the book, but here was a song that I had grown infatuated with (sorry). The answer was simple—I would multitask. Read and listen, listen and read. By the time Richard Marx hit his thundering crescendo, the Boston Observers had decided that war was the only answer to the problem of “taxation without representation,” and James Otis was delivering his famous (and fictional) “A man can stand up” speech. The two will be forever tied in my memory.

But that’s my burden to bear.

In case you haven’t read it, or seen the shoddy film with its airbrushed quality and the typical Disney message that anything, even war, can be a hoot if you just smile about it, Johnny Tremain is the Newberry Award-winning tale of a young silversmith’s apprentice caught up in the events surrounding Revolutionary Boston. The title character is pretty much the best silversmith’s apprentice in the city, and he knows it. But while breaking the Sabbath to make a sugar basin for John Hancock, a cracked crucible leaks hot silver and Johnny’s hand gets caught in it.

Forced out of the house, and out of his raison d’etre, the crippled Johnny moves into the attic above the shops of the Boston Observer, a subversive newspaper. Here he becomes deeply involved in the underground movement to separate from England, and he meets and becomes a spy for the likes of Sam and John Adams, Paul Revere, and Joseph Warren.

Johnny takes part in the Boston Tea Party, has a key role in the “One if by land” incident, and all the while continues to woo Cilla Lapham, daughter of his former master. Johnny is just sixteen when “the shot heard ’round the world” is fired, but, as he learns, sixteen makes him “a boy in time of peace and a man in time of war.”

When I first read this book, I was younger than Johnny and looked upon him with envy. He was older and had a girlfriend, which was enough, but he also played a key role in some of American history’s major events. Meanwhile, I was just another suburban kid living wholly without intrigue or excitement. I had no revolution to be part of, no cause for which to fight. I’d never have a chance to meet Paul Revere and Co., much less walk the enchanting 1775 Boston streets that Forbes brings alive so masterfully.

It was Forbes who first planted the idea that I wanted to live in Boston. I just had to see it for myself. Johnny Tremain led to Cheers, Cheers led to me researching colleges, my research led to Emerson (the school, not the man who coined “the shot heard round the world”), and Emerson is where I met Nico… which has led to a great deal of irritation and sour feelings, an indomitable Beer Pong team, and a nagging obligation to provide content to this website.

If not for Johnny Tremain, that line about Richard Marx would have continued to not exist.

* * *

As I’ve grown older, and as I’ve continued to read Johnny Tremain into adulthood, the envy has remained. I’ll never be sixteen again. I’ll probably never have a revolution to be a part of, nor a life-or-death cause for which to fight. The intrigue and excitement have never materialized. I’ll never find myself in a secret attic, listening to a great man saying, “We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skills… we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up.”

I did, however, get a chance to walk those streets that James Otis walked. I lived in the North End for a year, blocks away from Paul Revere’s house, the spire of the Old North Church (“two if by sea”) visible from my back courtyard. And I spent mornings watching the sun come up on Long Wharf, near where I first met Johnny Tremain by his “crooked little house at the head of Hancock’s Wharf on crowded Fish Street,” where in the mornings, from his attic window, he would look out over “counting houses, shops, stores, sails lofts, and one great ship after another, home again after their voyaging, content as cows waiting to be milked.”

It was almost enough.

* * *

This isn’t all about envy, though. I was jealous of Johnny and wanted to be him, but I also liked him. He’s a very complex character, especially for a children’s book, and even at a young age I could tell that Forbes was an all-around excellent writer. Pride, envy, patriotism, class struggles, sacrifice, family skeletons, a smattering of race issues—it’s a lot to cram into a YA book. I don’t know why Forbes isn’t better known in our era, or more widely read. This book won the Newberry, and her Paul Revere and the World He Lived In snagged a Pulitzer, but many of her books are out of print and difficult to find.

Her writing chops are hard to deny, though. Here, a group of Whigs have ransacked a house belonging to a wealthy merchant, a man that Johnny believes he is related to. Johnny and Cilla have gone to gather up any remaining valuable before the mob returns:

His footsteps echoed through the cast, silent reaches of the house. One after another the heavy shutters slammed to and he bolted them. A protest of unused hinges and then a bang, and he went on to the next. The echo of his own footsteps.

“My grandfather built this house…”

“My mother knew it and loved it…”

“My father dead before ever I was born…”

Now, for as long as it stood, this would be a haunted house. He felt the ghosts waiting in darkness until he and Cilla were gone before they stepped forth to take possession.

After Lexington and Concord, Johnny takes a moment to reflect:

He could smell turned earth and gummy buds. And sweet wood somewhere burning. His nostrils trembled. Almost could they recapture the gunpowder of yesterday. So fair a day now drawing to its close. Green with spring, dreaming of the future yet wet with blood.

This was his land and these his people.

My childhood fondness makes me biased, but I honestly believe I would enjoy Johnny if I were to read it now for the first time. Plain and simple, this is a great book for all ages.

I used to read it every 4th of July. A couple years back I let that slide, but no longer. Might I suggest that you try the same. Go to your parade in the morning, cook out in the afternoon, light your fireworks at night, but in between, read this book to help you remember what it’s all about.

And crank the Richard Marx, goddamn it.

_____

*If you believe that someone actually has written this line before, send proof to info@chamberfour.com. If your claim is proven, David Duhr will walk nude through the North End playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on a fife.**

** If anyone owns a fife, please email info@chamberfour.com

The first years of my life that I can remember were spent in a sunny apartment on the edge of campus in a small New Hampshire college town.  There was a big front porch we shared with the other families in our building, and a willow tree out back where the neighborhood kids gathered to start games of freeze tag.

Then, just before I started school, my family moved into a house farther out from the center of town.  You couldn’t see our closest neighbors through the trees, and they wouldn’t have heard you if you shouted.  The land behind us was part of a nature preserve, 163 acres of woods and wildlife.  It was quiet at night and dark.  There weren’t even any streetlights.

These are all things I love about the house I grew up in now, but I remember being scared of everything then, scared of the silence, scared when I heard a sound, scared of the dark woods at night, scared of the shadows beneath the trees in the day.  My parents didn’t have much experience in the outdoors, and neither was much help dispelling whatever terror I saw when I stared out our kitchen windows.  My mother worried about bears, and her worries only confirmed my belief that there was something out there.

It wasn’t until Mrs. Von Burske’s second grade class that I finally heard Danny the Champion of the World read aloud.  I brought the book home and made my father read it to me.  Then my mother.  Then I read it.  Then I read it again.  The book obsessed me, the story of Danny and his father and the fine art of poaching.

Danny lives in a small English town, in a gypsy caravan on the edge of a great wood.  When he wakes up late one night to find his father out, he becomes inducted into the secret world of pheasant poaching.  He learns the trade secrets from his father, handed down from his grandfather, and eventually he tries out his own tricks on the coveted flock of the comically evil Mr. Hazell.

It wasn’t anything sudden or dramatic, but after I’d practically memorized Danny’s adventures I started thinking differently about my surroundings.  There were great passages that described the woods as I saw them.  When Danny ventures into Hazell’s Wood alone at night, Danny says:

The sense of loneliness was overwhelming, the silence as deep as death, and the only sounds were the ones I made myself.  I tried to keep absolutely still for as long as possible, to see if I could hear anything at all.  I listened and I listened.  I held my breath and I listened again.  I had a queer feeling that the whole wood was listening with me, the trees and the bushes, the little animals hiding in the undergrowth and the birds roosting in the branches.  All were listening.  Even the silence was listening.

Then of course he forges ahead and everything turns out all right.  But more than Danny’s example of bravery, it was the portrayal of poaching that stuck with me, that there were tricks to taming the wilderness, and that anyone with a little patience could learn those tricks.  I wondered if maybe I could do that.

One passage describes a technique for poaching trout right out of a stream using only your bare hands.  Since there was a stream running along the edge of our property and into the nature preserve, this seemed like a logical place to start.  The stream was about half an acre into the woods, and I can’t say how many times I started in alone only to run back out, but eventually I reached it’s edge.  I lay on my belly with one hand in the water feeling along the muddy bank, half hoping I would, half hoping I wouldn’t, lay my hand on a slimy, sleeping trout.

After that, I played poacher all the time.  I crept around, practicing stealth and setting traps for squirrels that never worked.  I wanted so much to see a pheasant that when I finally caught sight of a wild turkey, it seemed almost too good to be true.  I started spending so much time in the woods and exploring so deeply that my mother set a rule: if I couldn’t see the house, I’d gone too far and I had to come back.

My friend PJ and I followed this rule very literally.  As we went farther into the nature preserve, we took turns convincing the other that we could still see some sliver of the house, a corner of the roof, a single slate shingle, just enough so we could go a little farther.  We found fallen trees, stumps gnawed by beavers, a swamp, a hiking trail, and then one day we popped out onto a road.  I remember looking back, a little frightened to be so far from home but surprised to learn that the woods ended somewhere.

Danny the Champion of the World wasn’t the first book I read or the first book I loved.  My house was filled with books, and I was likely doomed to a reader’s life long before I learned the alphabet.  But Danny was the first book I read that left the world changed once I’d finished it.  The world outside my house was larger, full of fallen trees and wild turkeys, and somehow it all lead to a road.  I wouldn’t learn where that road went until years later when I got my driver’s license and began to piece my town together from behind the wheel, but by then I’d long since stopped looking back through the trees to see how far I was from home.

I loved all Christopher Pike novels when I was upping my bra sizes. From the ages of 10 to 14, I read every book he wrote or had written: a total of 29 young adult and 3 adult novels—though I am appalled to discover that I missed a Tatyana Ali / Jonathan Brandis TV movie based on Fall into Darkness, which is inexplicably billed as “A True Story.” (I admit I had JB on my wall during his SeaQuest 2032 days, right next to 21 Jump Street’s Johnny Depp. I liked boys with pretty faces, which, later in life, will make perfect sense.)

I distinctly remember my first Pike experience. I was home sick from school, sitting on the couch as my mom left for work. She’d made sure I had all of the necessities in reach: a can of Pepsi, the remote control, and two books she’d brought home for me (which I greeted with the customary aloofness of a preteen). The cover—by which I judge a book—of Remember Me pictured a girl’s body sprawled on the flagstones below a balcony railing where an ominous hand rests. Whisper of Death’s cover had the black-robed, skeletal figure of Death hitchhiking near a few scared teenagers on a deserted highway.

I chose to start with Remember Me because I thought that Whisper of Death would be scarier (even though now I think the cover is cheesy); I wasn’t sure I wanted to be home alone and petrified. After all, just a couple of years earlier I’d made my mother return a book about a rogue, school-project volcano that she had suggested might be too scary for me.* If I couldn’t sleep with The (unread) Volcano Disaster in my bedroom, how could I read a book that I (wrongly) assumed was about the character Death stalking and killing teenagers?

I devoured RM that afternoon and WoD the next morning. As it turns out, realistic murder is much scarier than gore and revenge spells, even if said realistic murder is then investigated by the ghost of the dead girl who (of course) can enter dreams and read minds. Yes, the plot of Remember Me is, true to teen-horror form, a bit fantastical. A girl wakes up in her bedroom after a night of partying—but wait, she’s dead! Everyone thinks it was suicide, but it can’t be; she knows she never would have killed herself. Someone must have done it. But who? Her jealous boyfriend? Her best friend? Her own brother?!?

My memory of most of Pike’s books read like twisted Friends episodes. Weekend: The one about the kids that accidentally murdered someone’s adopted sister in a horrible and gruesome way, but she never actually died and she stalks and kills them on their weekend vacation. Scavenger Hunt: The one about the high school sponsored scavenger hunt where teens are stalked and killed. Die Softly: The one where the killer kills people by tying them up, putting a straw in their noses, and forcing them to OD on cocaine. Witch: The one about the teenage witch with the ability to heal people, but it weakens her every time and could (read “does”) mean her death. I couldn’t tell you even one character’s name in any of these books.

I remember the covers better than the plot. Except his first two books (Weekend and Chain Letter) or his adult novels, Pike’s paperbacks were designed with the neon author signatures and titles stamped on so you could feel the raised letters—this was the era of the embossed cover. It was thrilling to stand in the bookstore tracing the bumps of a new text, which I had been just dying for since finishing Pike’s previous offering. These bumps made the book seem more tangible somehow, as if his worlds were physical places that I could enter (so I too could be stalked and murdered!).

But even more than the individual plots or the covers, it is the experience of reading these books that I best recall. I remember staying up past 1 a.m. reading Witch and sobbing because the heroine (who I’m sure has a name) was dying to save her long lost brother who would never even remember her sacrifice. I remember regularly talking to my boyfriend Vinnie on the phone and reading at the same time. Our conversations went something like this:

Shannon: Uh huh, yup, hold on.

Vinnie: Are you reading again?

(silence)

Vinnie: Stop reading!

(silence)

Vinnie: OK, I’m gonna go. . . .”

Shannon: No, wait, I’m not reading! Hold on just one second . . .

And I remember wanting so badly to be the heroine of any of Pike’s novels: self-sacrificing, strong (her strength gained, of course, through some terrible adversity, such as being stalked by a murder who has already killed all of her friends), and always victorious in the end, even if she dies in the process—something I recall frequently happening in Pike books. Pike’s protagonists were almost always beautiful, rich, and blonde. I remember really, really wanting to be blonde and thinking that it would just naturally happen by high school. (It didn’t.)

These days I think it’s a little creepy that I so willfully identified with these characters because it means, at a basic level, that I wanted to be a victim. (A blonde victim, please.) Through reading horror and watching soap operas with my mother, I learned to admire strength and poise. However, a character must go through a terrible experience to demonstrate those qualities. This happens in all drama, not just in melodrama. Happy characters just aren’t interesting so they are compelled by writers to search for love or lose love; they get hit by cars, raped, or beaten; they watch their fathers and their mothers fall off a cliff at the same time; or (of course) they are stalked and murdered. And we, as spectators, learn that such trauma serves to demonstrate who we are as people: good or bad, strong or weak. So the question that follows is: If we (as spectators) are not stalked by deranged killers, how will we know what sort of people we are?

About a year ago, feeling nostalgic, I reread Remember Me. I was shocked at its sex, drinking, and profanity. I almost feel like I got away with something—like I did when I hid a copy of Rubyfruit Jungle under my bed after my parents forbade me to read it. Mostly, I was sad that the writing and the story didn’t hold up for me (also true for RJ). Honestly, I’ve already reforgotten the plot twists and the characters’ names. I know I shouldn’t expect much from a mass market, young adult thriller, but I am a loyal and devoted fan. I will read anything Matt Ruff writes, though I’ve never liked any book as much as his first. I will defend the much maligned Faith and Season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to all naysayers. I will force my girlfriend to rewatch D.E.B.S. and feel pure joy every time Lucy Diamond and Scud sing Erasure’s “A Little Respect” into a broom handle. None of these diversions are above criticism, but I will find you and kill you if you say anything mean to them. (I mean, “about them,” because they are not people and I am not crazy. . . .)

And I want to defend Christopher Pike’s oeuvre, too. I only stopped reading his books because it became too embarrassing to shop in the Young Adult section of the bookstore and my need to be accepted beat out my proclivity for teen horror. But I can’t find much to defend in Pike’s books. I can only offer the feeling I get when I think of them, which is a faint sadness. I’m nostalgic for a time when I believed that as long as I was strong everything would be okay. I could triumph over anything, even death. It was such a simple message and, if you ignore the prerequisite stalkings and murders needed to achieve such strength, a good message. Too bad in real life, rather than innate strength, it takes years of therapy to overcome such trauma. But that’s why it’s fiction. It lets you escape from real life and return unscathed. I guess that’s something worth defending.

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*Side note: Upon further research, it turns out that is not the plot of this book! That cover is etched in my memory though:

I loved Weirdos From Another Planet when summers were timeless. Really, I loved (and still love) all Calvin and Hobbes, but Weirdos From Another Planet was the first I ever read, and it got me hooked. It was given to me and my little brother by a family friend when I was eight. I read it over and over that summer and in the summers to come. Soon I added the other great collections (with other great names like Scientific Progress Goes “Boink”).

I grew up at a summer camp, so my vacations were unique from those of most of my friends as a child. I didn’t do summer sports leagues, or participate in local swim clubs. I said goodbye to my school friends in June, and didn’t see them again until September. The second half of my summers I formally attended the camp my parents run, but the first half was a bit different. I lived at the camp as a sort of ghost–an eight-year-old staying at a summer camp, but not actually participating. I spent a lot of time occupying myself–mostly reading or playing Nintendo.

Reading has always been my number one escape from the world, the closest I will ever come to meditation. I know I’m not unique in this–otherwise I don’t suspect this site would have many readers. I was a geeky bookworm by first grade, but Weirdos From Another Planet is the first book that ever hit me like a drug. It was different from anything I’d ever read. I wasn’t big on comics as a kid (I’m still not), and I’m usually big on story and complex characterization when it comes to books I enjoy. While this collection of comic strips, like the others, contains a few story lines that wend through the pages, there is no overarching story line to speak of.

Calvin, however, is one of the most complex characters ever put to paper, despite being delivered through a mostly prose-less (and verse-less) medium. He is a confused and misunderstood little boy. He is a terrible student and a disobedient trouble-maker of a son. He has no friends, he’s bullied at school, he spends half his life being scolded by his teacher, his principal, his parents. The girl next door, Susie Derkins, occasionally gives him a chance at friendship, which he can’t help but trample.

Calvin perpetually finds himself required to participate in a world he can’t manage to fit into. So he creates his own.

First and most importantly, he creates a friend. Hobbes is his stuffed tiger. Calvin bestows upon him a personality completely distinct from his own. In many instances Hobbes is wiser, often playing a voice of reason for Calvin to ignore or refute. But he’s not infallible. Hobbes is often susceptible to Calvin’s faulty logic, especially when it comes to worldly things. That is, the two can have an intelligent discourse on the philosophical implications of a piece of trash left in the woods, but in the next strip, they might be completely baffled about how bread becomes toast.

Hobbes–and Calvin’s relationship with Hobbes–represents Calvin’s inability to interact with the world; the big words they use represent the ideas and sentiments that occur to him and yet he can’t articulate.

I identified with that, sometimes I still do. I sometimes felt that alienation at school–true or not, when I was in elementary school I felt smarter than a lot of my classmates, and that created gulfs that wouldn’t be bridged until high school. But I most especially felt these gulfs while I was laying alone on a July afternoon in our cottage at the edge the camp, listening to the other kids sailing, swimming, playing sports, having fun.

I didn’t have much sense of time in those early half summers. I shut out the camp and became absorbed with Calvin as he and his tiger took a stroll or wagon ride through the great expanse of woods behind his house.

I had plenty of woods to roam in, too. And sometimes I’d do that. But mostly I just lay in bed and shut my ears to the world. Like Calvin I’d close my brain to the structured world around me. I’d forget all about who my world wanted me to be, and how I was supposed to fit. It was just me and my thoughts, and Calvin’s stuffed tiger.

A book had never captured my imagination in such a way before. I became immersed in the pages, a participant. Single panes stretched into vast, living landscapes. I’d read plenty of adventure stories, but none ever gripped me like the imaginary adventures that occurred in Calvin’s backyard, or Spaceman Spiff’s intergalactic struggles, or the wagon trip to the prehistoric era of dinosaurs. Weirdos From Another Planet let me in and and engaged me like no book I had ever read.

I still reread Calvin and Hobbes every summer. A few years back I picked up the beautiful box set of the complete series (worth every penny). I guess I could probably read from it whenever I want, but it only ever feels right in the summer, when it’s so hot and sticky that the best feeling in the world is a breeze fluttering through the curtains. Right then is when I am brought back to that place of nothingness, not nostalgia, but something passed it. Calvin and Hobbes taught me how to make time disappear, to enter my own personal, if brief, nirvana.

I fell in love with these books when they taught me this, how to turn off time as I knew it. I fell in love them when they taught me how to read, really read–prose and paragraphs be damned. I’m thankful to them for it. And I still love them now, more than almost anything.

The “Post-War Optimism” Edition – 1950

The first edition cover is easily the classiest. I like the abstract cosmic elements: the unspecific galactic clouds, planets, and the twirling rocket paths. To me it feels very Eisenhower-era space-race chic, right down to the serious, official-looking font. Even though this cover doesn’t quite convey the tone of the book, which is far more somber compared to the whimsical rocket adventure promised above, I like the simplicity of the concept. I’d read this book.

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The “Ed Wood Edition” – 1954

And here’s the other side of the 1950s coin – The Martian Chronicles as boffo b-movie adventure. I can just imagine William Castle promoting this thing, promising free Martian Vision goggles with every ticket. You can almost hear the orchestra sting as the title appears on the screen in that weird monster movie font. And I love the tag line at the bottom: “a masterly history of tomorrow’s pioneers.” And what kind of people are tomorrow’s pioneers? Well…

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The “Mike Hammer” Edition – 1951

…apparently they came from Ohio, Alabama, and California, our three greatest states. I think the artist must’ve mixed up Ray Bradbury and Dashiell Hammett in his mind and tried to imagine what Sam Spade would do on Mars. Probably bust a few Martian skulls, that’s what. Thankfully he packed his pistol and binoculars, and is prepared to weather the harsh Martian climate in Dockers. Also note the parade of tough guides streaming from the rocket – maybe it was some sort of government program, to round up all the P.I.’s in the world, toss them up on Mars and let them sort things out for the rest of us. This cover is so hilariously misleading that I’d be willing to believe there’s another writer named Ray Bradbury who happened to write a pulp novel inexplicably titled The Martian Chronicles, and that I’m just a poor researcher.

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The “Galaga” Edition – 1978

The Space Wizard here is a personal favorite. Much like the above cover, this edition promises lots of things that Bradbury’s text absolutely fails to deliver: crazy alien magic, hovering bug ships, and Orko from He-Man without his hat and scarf combo. I do give the artist credit for attempting (I think) to render the bizarre Martian insect car described in the chapter titled “Night Meeting”, though the wings are an interesting creative tweak. This could also serve as the art for the side of the Martian Chronicles arcade console.

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The “Starship Troopers Edition” – 1979

Again with the techno-bug, though this version is far more pointy and terrifying. It seems to get quite a bit of attention considering Bradbury only spends a sentence or two describing it. This appears to be the armored assault model, which does not appear in the book but is tailor-made for the Martian Chronicles line of action figures. The Earth-Mars design is neat, though – without the bug this could be a really effective cover. Almost Saul Bass-y, if it had a more kinetic title font.

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The “Print Shop Deluxe” Edition – 1997

Marble background, gold border, small, graphic – all of it reeks of the early 90s (though the Harper-Collins website states it was published in 1997.) This cover is a 180 degree shift from the Space Wizard – rather than exciting promises that the book can’t keep, this edition plays it safe by representing the plot and themes with a bland image of an unspecific action. “None of the characters are explicitly illiterate, are they? So chances are someone is doing some reading in this thing.” Oh, but the hand does have six fingers, which is pretty creepy. And suitably, generically alien. I take it all back – best cover ever.

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The “Rush” Edition – 1989

This was the edition I picked up when I first read the book in 1995. Despite that, I have no nostalgic fondness for it because it’s pretty awful. I remember being put-off by the Martian’s hair. It shouldn’t look that way, should it? Even if we push past the bald alien cliche and allow that maybe our Martian friends could have hair, it certainly wouldn’t be all close-cropped like that, would it? And what of the vests, or tunics, or whatever these two are wearing? It all feels very un-Martian. The masks are taken directly from the novel, though, so bonus points for that. And I like landscape – even the random, seemingly purposeless spindly towers are appropriately otherworldly. I think the gloss is what’s so unappealing in this design – too slick, too precisely rendered. This is a prog rock album waiting to happen.

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The “Pre-mature Tribute” Edition – 1972

Excluding non-fiction, how often do writers show up on the covers of their own books? Almost never, especially when the author is still alive, which makes this edition pretty special. The line drawing of Bradbury definitely adds more gravitas than a photograph, and I like that his head is positioned in such a way that exciting Martian action seems to be a giant thought bubble. Also, bonus points for its striking resemblance to the cover of Miles Davis’s album “Miles Smiles”.

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The “Timeless” Edition – ????

This is my favorite of the covers I’ve found because it simply and elegantly captures the tone of the book. The Martian Chronicles isn’t about sci-fi action, or rockets, or even Martians, really; it’s both a love letter to and critique of pre-World War II America. Bradbury uses the Mars and the sad fate of the Martians as a background for stories that question the stability of “American values.” And though the scope is grand, the stories themselves are actually quite small and enclosed, usually involving only two or three characters at a time. With its Anytown, USA houses set before a Martian horizon (ok it could just be the sun, but the cover is red, so let’s say it’s Mars) this cover describes a quiet and thoughtful, but still extraordinary, reading experience.

There are, of course, more covers than these. Feel free to dredge up your favorites, or least favorites, and give them their due in the comments.

I loved The Martian Chronicles when I was a 7th grade dork. The title alone was like chum dropped in dork-infested waters. The word “chronicles” promises epic adventures, swords and bloody battles, maybe some monsters, and definitely some beautiful women. Then take that and set it on Mars, the most exciting and alien-laden of all planets? I was sold.

The title is probably also the reason why, when given a choice between Chronicles and Peter Dickinson’s young adult novel Eva, nearly all of my 7th grade Reading classmates chose the latter, the story of a teenage girl whose brain is transplanted into a chimp’s body following a car crash. No extra-planetary adventures, no dense passages detailing the fictional history of a fictional people—just a girl’s name. Also, the plot summary promised a relatable young protagonist dealing with real—real-ish—problems. But I didn’t want relatable, or real. I wanted dense histories and strange faces and giant lasers.

Of course, I didn’t get any of that. Bradbury’s take on sci-fi is miles away from the fantastic action and adventure of Star Wars, He-Man, and the superhero comics I’d grown up with. His characters aren’t romantic heroes, but sad, desperate, naïve people who are undone by their own desire to escape a failing world. The Martians aren’t single-minded monsters or would-be conquerors; instead they’re as intelligent, brash, confused, and lonely as any of the human characters.

Instead of adventure, Bradbury’s stories raise questions and push their characters to examine their natures and motives. Indeed, “Spender,” the one story that contains a lengthy battle scene, is more of a meditation on zealotry, environmentalism, and the writing of history. And the title is ironic—rather than chronicles, Bradbury offers only vignettes, a sort of pointillism storytelling with minimal connectivity.

But I wasn’t disappointed. The disorienting structure, melancholy feel, and lyric descriptions of desolate Martian landscapes all heightened my awareness that I and my few friends had taken sides against our classmates. The sadness I felt when reading the chapter titled “There Will Come Soft Rains”—about an automated house of the future that self-destructs after its occupants are vaporized in a nuclear explosion—seemed miles away from anything the popular kids could articulate. I’m not pretending that we chose to read about aliens because we felt alienated, but certainly reading the “wrong” book was yet another step in our adolescent trend towards outsiderdom.*

I don’t want to turn my middle school trials and troubles into hagiography. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. As a culture we tend to think of young nerds as pathologically trying to belong to the mainstream, but always rebuffed thanks to prodigious intellectual gifts and/or mild to severe mental illness. My friends and I were mocked and bullied by some, sure, but we mostly got by through a kind of willful isolation. We felt like we didn’t fit in, so we mostly kept to ourselves. We were awkward and shy. We took Gym (games, running laps around the gym) instead of Athletics (football, track), and ate lunch by ourselves, at our own table. We liked cartoons like “The Tick” and “Space Ghost: Coast to Coast” and read Wizard: the Guide to Comics and created our own comic strip starring a bizarre caricature of Jim Varney and some blood-thirsty squirrels. It was all part of a stand-offish and, at times, defensive posture that kept some of the pain at bay, but also kept us from growing. So it felt natural that everyone else was wrapped up in Eva’s bio-ethical questions, while we wondered about the morality of colonialism.

Even though I was only 12 it was impossible to miss Bradbury’s messages, which are somewhat less than subtle—racism, colonialism, xenophobia, censorship, disregard for nature, and nuclear weapons are bad; environmentalism, art, and non-violence are good. I was happy to read a book that assumed I was knowledgeable about history and literature, and rewarded me for it (the chapter “Usher II” is a big, nerdy pat on the back for anyone even passingly familiar with Poe’s stories) by flattering my sense of justice. The whole book seemed to be pleased that I had made such a bold decision to set myself apart, and in turn favored me with several sad, compelling stories, the first “real” book I would ever re-read just for the sheer pleasure of reinhabiting its fictional worlds.

Now, 15 years later, I still have never read Eva, and chances are I never will. I’m sure it’s a fine read, the kind of young adult novel that doesn’t talk down to its readers and asks them to wrestle with serious questions (no less venerable a source than Amazon.com user reviews bear that out). But part of me doesn’t want confirmation that the kids who chose to read it had just as satisfying an experience as I did reading The Martian Chronicles. It’s the same part, an ugly and unsavory part, that still clings to an “us vs. them” mentality.

Bradbury dismisses that kind of thinking quite beautifully in the book’s final chapter, “The Million Year Picnic.” One afternoon, a father takes his wife and three sons out for a fishing trip, and promises he will show his children real Martians. They’re one of the last human families left on Mars following the nuclear war that destroyed Earth, waiting for the final few family-bearing rockets to arrive. After destroying their own rocket, the father takes his children to a Martian canal:

“I’ve always wanted to see a Martian,” said Michael. “Where are they, Dad? You promise.”

“There they are,” said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down.

The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver.

The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.

The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water.

Obviously I wasn’t reading as carefully as I liked to think I was, or else I’d have realized that the boundaries between my friends and I and the rest of the class were flimsy and based mostly on confusion. Maybe if everyone had been made to read The Martian Chronicles we could’ve all stared into the canal together.

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*The pattern reemerged later in the school year when we were again asked to choose one of two books: Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes or Richard Adams’ Watership Down. You might imagine that bunny rabbit adventures would be the socially acceptable option compared to Bradbury’s treatise on aging and friendship set in a sinister sideshow, but that’s not the case when you’re struggling through puberty. Even the girls called me a wuss.