Read Online High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver - Free Book Online
Authors: Barbara Kingsolver
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suspected my mother felt was kind of trashy, and I found Edgar Allan Poe, who scared me witless. I found that the call number for books about snakes is 666. I found William Saroyanâs Human Comedy , down there on the shelf between Human Anatomy and Human Physiology, where probably no one had touched it since 1943. But I read it, and it spoke to me. In spite of myself I imagined the life of an immigrant son who believed human kindness was a tangible and glorious thing. I began to think about words like tangible and glorious . I read on. After Iâd read all the good ones, I went back and read Human Anatomy and Human Physiology and found that I liked those pretty well too.
It came to pass in two short years that the walls of my high school dropped down, and I caught the scent of a world. I started to dream up intoxicating lives for myself that I could not have conceived without the books. So I didnât end up on a motorcycle. I ended up roaring hell-for-leather down the backroads of transcendent, reeling sentences. A writer. Imagine that.
Â
The most important thing about the books I read in my rebellion is that they were not what I expected. I canât say I had no previous experience with literature; I grew up in a house full of books. Also, Iâd known my way around the townâs small library since I was tall enough to reach the shelves (though the town librarian disliked children and censored us fiercely) and looked forward to the Bookmobile as hungrily as more urbane children listened for the ice cream truck. So dearly did my parents want their children to love books they made reading aloud the center of our family life, and when the TV broke they took about two decades to get around to fixing it.
Itâs well known, though, that when humans reach a certain age, they identify precisely what it is their parents want for them and bolt in the opposite direction like lemmings for the cliff. I had already explained to my classmates, in an effort to get dates, that I was raised by wolves, and I really had to move on from there. If I was going to find a path to adult reading, I had to do it my own way. I had to read things I imagined my parents didnât want me looking into. Trash, like Gone With the Wind . (I think, now, that my mother had no real problem with Gone With the Wind , but wisely didnât let on.)
Now that I am a parent myself, Iâm sympathetic to the longing for some control over what children read, or watch, or do. Our protectiveness is a deeply loving and deeply misguided effort to keep our kids inside the bounds of what we know is safe and right. Sure, I want to train my child to goodness. But unless I can invoke amnesia to blot out my own past, I have to see itâs impossible to keep her inside the world I came up in. That world rolls on, and you canât step in the same river twice. The things thatprepared me for life are not the same things that will move my own child into adulthood.
What snapped me out of my surly adolescence and moved me on were books that let me live other peopleâs lives. I got to visit the Dust Bowl and London and the Civil War and Rhodesia. The fact that Rhett Butler said âdamnâ was a snoozer to meâI hardly noticed the words that mothers worried about. I noticed words like colour bar , spelled âcolourâ the way Doris Lessing wrote it, and eventually I figured out it meant racism. It was the thing that had forced some of the kids in my county to go to a separate schoolâwhich wasnât even a school but a one-room CME churchâand grow up without plumbing or the hope of owning a farm. When I picked up Martha Quest , a novel set in southern Africa, it jarred open a door that was right in front of me. I found I couldnât close it.
If there is danger in a book like Martha Quest , and the works of all other authors whoâve been banned at one time or another, the danger is generally that they will broaden
It came to pass in two short years that the walls of my high school dropped down, and I caught the scent of a world. I started to dream up intoxicating lives for myself that I could not have conceived without the books. So I didnât end up on a motorcycle. I ended up roaring hell-for-leather down the backroads of transcendent, reeling sentences. A writer. Imagine that.
Â
The most important thing about the books I read in my rebellion is that they were not what I expected. I canât say I had no previous experience with literature; I grew up in a house full of books. Also, Iâd known my way around the townâs small library since I was tall enough to reach the shelves (though the town librarian disliked children and censored us fiercely) and looked forward to the Bookmobile as hungrily as more urbane children listened for the ice cream truck. So dearly did my parents want their children to love books they made reading aloud the center of our family life, and when the TV broke they took about two decades to get around to fixing it.
Itâs well known, though, that when humans reach a certain age, they identify precisely what it is their parents want for them and bolt in the opposite direction like lemmings for the cliff. I had already explained to my classmates, in an effort to get dates, that I was raised by wolves, and I really had to move on from there. If I was going to find a path to adult reading, I had to do it my own way. I had to read things I imagined my parents didnât want me looking into. Trash, like Gone With the Wind . (I think, now, that my mother had no real problem with Gone With the Wind , but wisely didnât let on.)
Now that I am a parent myself, Iâm sympathetic to the longing for some control over what children read, or watch, or do. Our protectiveness is a deeply loving and deeply misguided effort to keep our kids inside the bounds of what we know is safe and right. Sure, I want to train my child to goodness. But unless I can invoke amnesia to blot out my own past, I have to see itâs impossible to keep her inside the world I came up in. That world rolls on, and you canât step in the same river twice. The things thatprepared me for life are not the same things that will move my own child into adulthood.
What snapped me out of my surly adolescence and moved me on were books that let me live other peopleâs lives. I got to visit the Dust Bowl and London and the Civil War and Rhodesia. The fact that Rhett Butler said âdamnâ was a snoozer to meâI hardly noticed the words that mothers worried about. I noticed words like colour bar , spelled âcolourâ the way Doris Lessing wrote it, and eventually I figured out it meant racism. It was the thing that had forced some of the kids in my county to go to a separate schoolâwhich wasnât even a school but a one-room CME churchâand grow up without plumbing or the hope of owning a farm. When I picked up Martha Quest , a novel set in southern Africa, it jarred open a door that was right in front of me. I found I couldnât close it.
If there is danger in a book like Martha Quest , and the works of all other authors whoâve been banned at one time or another, the danger is generally that they will broaden
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