This year, I got two books for Christmas: Nadirs, a collection of short pieces from Nobel laureate Herta Muller, and The Death of Bunny Munro, the new novel by Nick Cave. I have been getting books for Christmas for as long as I can remember, and this memory takes me back to one of my first holiday traditions: reading whatever Stephen King brought out in the autumn.
Now, this is not a post about high art and low art. I am arguing neither that Stephen King deserves more attention than he gets from the academy, nor that his literature warrants that attention. (I have had students petition for King on American literature surveys; I cannot remember, in depth, any plot of a King book that has not been made into a film.) I am simply giving credit to Stephen King for igniting in me a love of reading.
Walking through the bookstore this holiday season, I noticed that Stephen King has released the 1088-page Under the Dome, precisely the kind of doorstopper I loved to open on Christmas morning. The challenge was to finish the book before I went to bed on December 26, giving me approximately 24 waking hours. This could mean, for hours at a time, I was averaging a page a minute. Our tree was always placed in front of the window in the living room, temporarily displacing a stuffed chair, and I would take up residence in that chair -- in the middle of the hustle and bustle -- reading Stephen King. I think of it now as an exercise in concentration. I was not cloistered away; rather, I participated in two full days of visitation, meals, festive films, all while immersing myself in a world vividly drawn by Mr. King.
I did get video games and all other manner of trendy gifts for Christmas, and I would have to wager, to judge by the bounty of my friends, that my Christmases were utterly "normal" in this regard. But this experiment in extreme reading was, in retrospect, very important to my development, and whether or not they are reading the current equivalent of Stephen King, I would like to think that kids today are still reading, assiduously, through this holiday season.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
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