Kid's Stuff

I was a late arriver at the book-reading party—at least compared to people I know who’ve been doing it since they were four, and still others who were being read Grimm’s fairy tales while they were in the womb, little embryos already being infused with all that dangerous lore. Yet before I voluntarily picked up that hardcover copy of Harry Potter, I had read other things. Just not books.

Sure, I often read bits from my father's copies of The Thousand and One Nights, The Book of Virtues, Aesop’s Fables, and the Bible. Then there was a book that was mine, La Flora y la Fauna del Yunque, a picture-book of the flora and fauna in El Yunque, a mountain and tropical rainforest in Puerto Rico, one of the island’s environmental and touristic landmarks. The Puerto Rican boa, a constrictive snake; the Puerto Rican parrot, in danger of extinction; the bamboos, in that festive firework formation… I would pore over all of these so many times every day. And then there were the picture cards of all the animals in the animal kingdom!!! They had come in a box, and that must have weighed at least a pound. Countless hours going over the eating habits of the cheetah, the nature of the dolphin, and trying to draw the baboon exactly as it appeared on the picture. Don’t even get me started on the dinosaur cards.

And then there are the multimedia influences: the notion of a mythological universe as expressed in RPG video games, the Super Mario universe, movies with sequels. And films, with the unavoidable way in which they make the viewer want to be a part of the filmed world: wanting to be ET’s friend, the shark hunter in Jaws, wanting to be in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

           I still feel like reading is a childish activity. The exhiliration, the intensity it produces, the way it just activates all these little mechanisms in the mind, that muscle, that ticking little muscle—it’s all like being a kid. And I wonder if that’s what I want, at the end of the day.

          And when I think of it that way, I feel it’s so strange how adults institutionalize the pleasure of reading. College professors of literature are overgrown kids who talk about what they love, the same way a kid will talk to you about Barney. The “English” Department is the Kiddie department. Whether one reads children’s literature or not, as a child or as an adult, the elemental reading muscle is childish. It’s awesome. It’s silly. And so many lives revolve around it.