Getting Started Early with Holiday Re-reading

I decided this year to get an early start on my holiday reading. I think I was challenged to do this when I learned that this year, Black Friday was actually starting on Thursday afternoon—3 pm on Thanksgiving Day. It occurred to me that if the stores could do this, so could I.

I was also a bit driven to start reading my holiday fare after seeing Arrival, a movie that is as much about linguistics as it is about aliens. After I saw it, I found my oldest copy of Lewis’s first book in his space trilogy, which also concerns a linguist and some fun passages about learning a language that is from another world. The rest—with early Black Friday and the allure of an old, folded book cover—seemed natural.

Holiday Re-reading

I started reading Out of the Silent Planet while on Thanksgiving break. This is what I do during the holidays. I read fantasy and science fiction, genres I don’t seem to be able to read the rest of the year. But during the holidays, I can. I reread books in a genre I used to love before I turned 18.Next on my list is Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

I don’t know why I can stay with these science fiction and fantasy books when I can't the rest of the year. I wonder if there is something wrong with me. I know that C.S. Lewis would say there is. One of the problems I’ve found with reading science fiction the rest of the year has to do with the fact that I can sense that the writer is more fascinated with the invention of the story than on character development. Mostly, as with many stories in other popular genres, the characters are secondary to the plot, the new world or worlds being explored, or some fantasy element that is innovative.

Normally, I like to read stories where characters surprise me. The relentless degenerate has a moment of sadness and sudden wonder at the world around him. The callous old man remembers something that draws him to humanity. This also feels like something very real. People surprise us. Most important to me, this suggests possibilities. People are like that—deeper than we think we know. We interact with them mostly on a day to day basis, and we rarely see the inner states they—and we—might be protecting.

Re-Reading is the Draw

Part of the draw in all of this is that I love rereading books. I see technique in old things—what I didn’t see during the first reading because I was just trying to figure out the plot. Seeing technique helps me as a writer. Also, I see things I didn't see before in the characters and their situations.

This time around with Lewis’s book, I’ve been noticing what other critics have sometimes said before about his adult characters: They really aren’t so developed as the worlds he is creating. In fact, they seem a bit unchangeable. They are either the good guys, aware of the beauty and wonder around them, which has drawn them to God, or they are the bad guys, who see the worlds they’ve entered as grounds to exploit, as they move forward, bent on world conquest.

There’s something good in this, of course, something I used to like about it. Out of the Silent Planet, a book I've read perhaps seven or eight times, has a distinctly satirical feel to it, and the bad guys who appear in it might, in another book, appear as the good guys—empire builders, fighters for humanity, world conquerors. In Lewis’s hands, they are exposed for the shrunken-souled megalomaniacs they really are. There is a spiritual quality to their being. In re-reading about them, I can hear his criticisms of empire builders on Earth, including those who settled the American continent.

The rest of the year, I might miss this. But now, there are some things I can see in Lewis, things he grasped almost 80 years ago that people around me are still not always clear about. T

To think I have the early consumerist glow of the stores and their demands nostalgia and spending to thank for this. It apparently is possible, if rarely, to make good come from bad. Reading. It is my way of battling creeping consumerism.