After the Readathon
My mother and I have matching TBR carts. Her is loaded with her textbooks for her work in women’s studies; mine is heavy with fantasy and Russian literature (a biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky that I have been trying to get through for a year) and Nordic noir (I love Nordic noir, though I confess I don’t believe that all these murders are happening in Iceland). Now, proudly sitting next to Pride and Prejudice is Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. This is my first Gaiman.
I am trying to find writers whose prose is so powerfully poetic, so sure of itself and its ability to toss jagged rocks at the soul and hit its target every time. I have not come up empty handed — The Book of Disquiet comes to mind — but I was eager to see this lyricism in The Graveyard Book. This is ostensibly a children’s book, and I want to read more of those so that I can someday write one. While I did not find that heightened, vivid language that I was hoping for, The Graveyard Book has otherwise been a great success.
The greatest children’s books respect children. They can be spooked. They can be moved. They can discern fiction from reality. They can remember and sort through the characters that they love. As a child myself, nothing was worse than a book or book reviewer who assumed that we tots could not read a book, that it was too gruesome or too frightening. Thus it is worth noting that Gaiman is trafficking in respect and darkness as twin souls holding hands on the page. There is humor, but there is also a murder opening the book. Into the night, into the fear. Gaiman knows that his readers will be moved by it. It is a wonderful read.
Because I am a writer, and one obsessed with expanding her craft, I always read with an eagerness to know what does not work in a book and what makes a text a masterpiece. This can be exhausting — God knows it’s led me to annotate book after book that I will never be able to sell or donate — but I do enjoy reading and hope that it waves a lesson in front of my eyes at the same time. Gaiman has taught me about how to respect children’s abilities in my own upcoming children’s book. Towards this goal, I have had wonderful professors in my program who gave me advice on everything from length to content. Following The Graveyard Book, I intend to pick up the books that moved me as a child, going forward with the lesson of respect that Gaiman has imparted on me.
I am not just going through The Graveyard Book. I am also reading Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, an engaging piece if a little cliched. I do love reading books about Mexico by Mexican authors. There is, as I said in my Project Novocaine blog, a pull to learn all I can about my heritage, as there is always something I don’t know about dear Mexico. Of course, I picked up Mexican Gothic because I wanted the atmosphere and mise-en-scene of horror (and I do feel that we as Latinx individuals are overlooked in this genre) for the Halloween season, the same reason that I am reading and loving Dracula. I have a dear friend, Sweeney Gray, who is the master of horror and is kindly acting as my guide as I learn more of this genre. If there is anything that he has taught me so far, it is that horror is also a way of life.
It’s enough to make me pick up the pen.
