nekare

Gabriel García Márquez passed away today. It sound really cliche, but he sort of did affect my life deeply in a way I didn't really realize until much later. Instead of reading age appropriate books to us, my 6th grade teacher decided to read his short story anthology to us, Doce Cuentos Peregrinos, though she did skip over the racy bits. It was seriously enchanting - I remember how we all freaked out with the one about a lady that goes to use the phone in a madhouse and then no one believes her, and picturing the boys swimming in light in La luz es como el agua scared me and resonated with me deeply.

She never told us who we were reading though, so finding the book years and years later after I had already fell in love with A Hundred Years of Solitude was a bit like a gift. I had always loved reading, well before that amazing teacher, but that was sort of my first taste of adult literature, and without it I'm sure I wouldn't have gone through the same path of books.

So farewell, Gabo, and thank you so much.

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In different but sort of related news, I've been listening to Chamber of Secrets on my nightly walks these past few weeks. I'd forgotten how charmingly funny JK Rowling can be!

I had also forgotten, however, how everything the Dursleys do to Harry would get them convicted for child abuse in, well, everywhere, really. There's a lot of talk about Petunia's talk to Harry in Deathly Hallows and how she was denied being redeemed in the movie, but reading it now, holy shit, screw her sadness, that does not deny a decade of neglect, hunger and verbal abuse. I think by then we'd all sort of forgotten about the early days of HP, and we just saw a seriously surprisingly well adjusted almost adult that could no longer be hurt by the Dursleys, instead of the little boy living under the stairs.

I started reading Harry Potter at age 12 - at that age, a child getting treated like that was like normal stuff in children's books, very dickensian and all, how all adults were all naturally mean and cruel and not to be trusted (don't give me that look, think about any book with a kid protagonist and the signs will be there). Reading it (listening to it, whatever) as an adult, that shit is just not ok, and is probably a lot more disturbing to read. I remember that I once tried to get my mom to start reading the first book, a few days before OotP was about to come out, and just gave it back after a chapter, pretty angry, because Harry was being treated so badly and couldn't read anymore. I hadn't thought of that in years...