If I had read less Stephen King and more Philip Pullman at 10, would I still be a great big dork, or would I have become a plucky young heroine? If I had put away my mother's Honey Bunch novels and picked up some Starhawk, if I had stopped reading porn on the internet and started paying attention. If I had read more openings like this from A Ruby in the Smoke:
On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1972, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and paid the driver.
She was a person of 16 or so, alone and uncommonly pretty. She was slender and pale and dressed in mourning, with a black bonnet under which she tucked back a staying twist of blond hair that the wind had teased loose. She had unusually dark brown eyes for one so fair. Her name was Sally Lockhart, and within fifteen minutes she was going to kill a man.
would I have had the courage to be a badass? Would I have spent my hard earned camp counselor salary on an electric guitar and amp instead of a television? Instead of just buying cigarettes for my high school crush while she was only 17 and I was 18, would I have had the courage to smoke them with her? Where would that person be today?
Or would I still be that quiet girl who knows lots of useless shit and reads all the time?
The point of all this is that I think Philip Pullman is amazing. His Dark Materials series is more transgressive and philosophical than Dan Brown can ever hope to comprehend. Dan Brown is such a joke in the first place. His idea of a 'tightly plotted thriller' contains more deus ex machina than any of Neil Gaiman's magical realism, wherein you meet the actual gods doing the machina-ing. Pullman's Ruby is a teen novel, but it takes us all over 19th century London, explores the careful and purposeful use of hallucinogens for enlightenment while showing the dark side of addiction, and contains the most awesome but realistic female main character I've had the good fortune to run across in quite some time. I Heart Sally Lockhart.
I can't change the high school me. It's entirely possible I can still become the plucky young heroine, though, so I'm going to go make dinner now, instead of reading blogs all night like usual.
Posted in Books, High School
