At some point in my pre-adolescence (not that I could exactly pinpoint my age), my mother began to lobby me with a book. I’m sure that I had been doing some profound limp-rag-draped-over-the-arm-of-the-couch-I-don’t-have-anything-good-to-read muttering when she first asked me something like, “Have you read King’s Solomon’s Mines?”
The limp rag shook its head.
“You should.”
The thing was, I didn’t want to. I hadn’t the least little inclination to pick up that book with the old binding and the rough-cut pages. It was . . . old. And old books had awkward English and ridiculous characters unable to function as human beings. Such was my wisdom.
She pushed that book on me several times, and every time I scorned the recommendation. I weren’t goingter read it. Ever. I was already bored, and just looking at the book made me boreder (run with me here, I don’t care if boreder isn’t a word).
So then, with discerning motherly wisdom and confidence, she commanded me to sit down. I did. Meekly. Without complaining. She sat down, too. And she had the book with her. The second command came: Listen.
And I listened.
She read me a chapter called “The Witch Hunt.” An unbelievable scene with drums and warriors and a dancing monkey of a witch, and executions. And as the scene came to its culmination, its throbbingly drummed zenith, my mother turned the book over, set it down, and walked away.
“You should read it,” she said. And I read it.
King Solomon’s Mines opened up a world to me. There was a whole swath of undiscovered adventure stories caught between eras. And I attacked them. Old bindings and raggedy pages were no longer intimidating. True, not one of them ever achieved the same impact that my first encounter with KSM did (and H. Rider Haggard let me down many times after), but a new pattern of reading had been established, and all adventure tales were measured against Haggard’s achievement.
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