This evening, I was browsing through the fiction section at Barnes, when I spotted Victor Hugo's Les Miserables on the shelf. "Ooh, I've been wanting to read that!" I said to myself.* So I grabbed it off the shelf, grabbed a couple other books, and then sat down to read. I turned over Les Mis and started reading the back. Wait...Jean Valjean? I knew that name! A couple lines later, I realized that I had already read this book!
This is why sometimes I think reading is such a waste of time. I gave that book hours of my life, and a few years later, it's like I never read it at all! WTF?! On the other hand, if I could do that with Harry Potter...man if only.
Before I left, I sat down with "Where the Wild Things Are." It's really quite an amazing book. While I walked home in the darkness and misty rain, I tried to figure out what made it so good, despite the fact that nothing much really happens in the story. I came to the conclusion that one major element was the moment when the world inside the kid's mind merged with the world we know as real. This merging occurred ultra-smoothly in two places:
1st: When the kid gets sent to bed without supper, and starts dreaming, only it's written in the kid's perspective: rather than writing "The boy began dreaming", the author wrote "That night in his room, a forest grew...and grew...until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world around"; and
2nd: At the end, when he's still dreaming, he smells something delicious cooking, so he decides to abandon the monsters and return to his bedroom where dinner awaits him. Of course (in my opinion anyway), he was just waking up from his dream.
The transition between worlds is so seamless, it's breathtaking. Like transitions between real dreams, actually.
*In fact, it was NOT the one I've been meaning to read. I was confusing it with War & Peace, which I bought along with an anthology of spy stories
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