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Предисловие к книге "Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading" американской авторши Люси Мэнган:

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I STILL HAVE all my childhood books. In fact, I have spent some of my happiest hours in recent months arranging them on the bespoke bookcases I had built under the sloping ceiling of my study for their ease and comfort. I may no longer imagine them, as I did thirty years ago, whispering companionably together at night when I have gone to bed, but I love them still. They made me who I am.

'Pallid,' says my sister, peering over my shoulder as I type this. 'Bespectacled. Friendless.' Which is also true. And yet, who needed flesh-and-blood friends when I had Jo March, Charlotte, Wilbur and everyone at Malory Towers at my beck and call?

Remember hiding a book on your lap to get yourself through breakfast? Remember getting hit on the head by footballs in the playground because a game had sprung up around you while you were off in Cair Paravel? Remember taking yourself off to the furthest corner of the furthest sofa in the furthest room of the house with a stack of Enid Blytons and praying that everyone would forget about you till bedtime? Come bedtime, do you remember waiting four nanoseconds after the door closed before whipping out your torch and carrying on where parental stricture had required you leave off until tomorrow? Was your first crush on Dickon instead of Johnny Depp? Do you still get the urge to tap the back of a wardrobe if you find yourself alone in a strange bedroom, or keep half an ear out at midnight for the sound of Hatty in the garden?

If so, this is the book for you. But then, most books are. You are, like me, a bookworm. Little more needs to be said, apart from: I hope you enjoy this memoir of my own childhood reading and that it brings back happy memories of your own. It is a look back at the books I loved – needed, depended on – as a child. I've tried to contextualise them, give their backgrounds (why, for example, was The Family from One End Street considered shocking by some when it first appeared? Who was the first author to use a first-person narrative in a children's book?); potted biographies of their authors (which hugely successful female children's writer whose name was not J. K. Rowling began writing only because she was desperate for money? What did E. B. White's colleagues at the hallowed New Yorker think of him producing, of all things, a children's book about a spider and a pig?); and a sense of where they come in the history of children's literature. But this is a personal account of the classics and not-so-classics that shaped my world and thoughts, and so necessarily incomplete. I read omnivorously but not well and certainly without a thought for posterity. I read because I loved it. I read wherever I could, whenever I could, for as long as I could. At birthday parties – not least my own – I would stealthily retreat as soon as the games began, to the most hidden corner of whatever house I was in, gathering any available volumes on the way and reading furiously through them until a hateful adult found me and demanded my return or, if I was lucky, told me it was home time. In the summer holidays, I could read literally from dawn till dusk, unaware of anything until forcibly recalled to real life.

Those were the days, my friends. Those were the days. Do we ever manage again to commit ourselves as wholeheartedly and unselfconsciously as we do to the books we read when young? I doubt it. I have great hopes for retirement but for the moment, as an adult of working age and a mother of a five-year-old, life is unfortunately too much with me to allow such gorgeous, uninterrupted stretches of immersion in a book.

But let us relive, for the next few chapters at least, a little of those glorious days when reading was the thing and life was only a minor inconvenience.

Кто-нибудь себя узнал в этом описании?

Почему современное общество не признает интровертов?

Цитата: Devorator linguarum от мая 21, 2020, 22:41
Кто-нибудь себя узнал в этом описании?

У меня была такая же книгомания. Единственная разница, шликала я на Джонни Деппа, кто вообще этот Дикон?

К счастью, нет. В детстве наслаждался жизнью без чрезмерного эскапизма.

И, кстати, человек, который постоянно читает книги у меня не ассоциируется напрямую с интроверсией. Тем более, что худ литература полна персонажей и диалогов. Возможно, просто он не доволен средой, в которой находится, не может / не хочет в ней раскрываться.

В книгах в отличие от реальности люди общаются адекватно.

Цитата: Easyskanker от июня  9, 2020, 19:02
У меня была такая же книгомания. Единственная разница, шликала я на Джонни Деппа, кто вообще этот Дикон?

Лол. Ну, да. Ну, про меня. И что? Моя детская интроверсия с годами шлифанулась, но, разумеется, меня не покинула. Мешает ли она ищущим моего общения? Наверно, да. Меня же самого она лишь дополняет. Когда внутри тебя самодостаточная вселенная — это ж разве плохо?