Strange Things, I’ve Read a Few

Okay, so what strange things do YOU read? When the stress is high and you just want to scream, what books do you reach for? When you need comfort reads, what do you gloam onto? And what strange things did you come across in your printed journey that enthralled you, even though it shouldn’t have?

Most of my strange tastes come from when I was very young. You see, in that galaxy far far away where I grew up, somewhere between Elizabethan England and Victorian England, but speaking Portuguese, books weren’t published in as massive numbers as here. There was one science fiction imprint. One. Good old Argonauta. And back list was an unheard of word. You got it when it came out or you were out of luck.

And then the seventies came (Aaaaack and run in dread, as the rest of you know who had the misfortune of coming of age in the time of bell bottoms and men whom surgery rendered incapable of singing anything but disco.) In that etrange little pays q’etait le mien (with apologies to the divinity of French spelling) this meant really high book prices. Well, mostly really high inflation for anything legal. But books also got interesting taxes if I remember, because, eh… culture. Who needs that?

So… as I hit nine or ten, a book needed to be frightfully, scarily bad for me not to read it more than six times. I mean, this was BC — before children — when I read up to six books a day. HAD to read six books a day. Totally addicted.

I burned through all of my poor brother’s sf/f. Bribed male friends out of their boy-club adventures. Read all of my cousin Natalia’s “blue collection” romances. Read the accumulated family library, including most of Shakespeare, Austen and Dumas (including the really bad Dumas, yes.) In despair, I even bribed friends to get their father’s old SF collections — how I came by City and They Walked Like Men. Of course, my dad’s mystery collection was completely fair game, as was anything else that came under the devouring reading apetite, including but not limited to “literature” “encyclopedias” and want adds.

As you can imagine, a childhood like that scars you deeply and irretrievably. One of the (sniffle) horrible scars I bear is the ability to enjoy less than divine prose. Heck, to enjoy the living daylights out of formulaic stuff that is nonetheless entertaining.

Some of the stuff aged badly, at least for me. I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of Thomas Mann in either German, Portuguese or English. And WHAT was with Thus Spake Zarathrusta? Don Quixote, too, I’d agree with Borges, was the most unnecessary of all books ever written.

But other stuff… Ah, other stuff I return to in time of distress, like a child seeking his mother’s embrace after hurting himself.

One of these is Leslie Charteris’ Saint books. If you’ve only watched the movie, find these books and read them. MUCH better than the — largely insufferable — movie. Poorly edited and, more importantly, often bizarrely copyeditted, they nonetheless have fast paced stories and suddenly delightful turns of phrase. I would love to see a take on this updated and done in space opera. Heck, I might even do it, someday.

Another one is Giovanni Guareschi’s Don Camillo stories. Yes, I know they’re dated, branded really, by their post WWII cold war world. And yet… And yet, I would bet you — bet you real money — that if you go into them with a seeing eye, you will find some of the best crafted short stories this side of heaven. JUST perfect little gems. The ones with Don Camillo are good enough, but then there are the ones set in that universe that are just perfect ghost stories or supernatural gems.

If you venture into that realm, I recommend Shotgun Wedding; Bianco; Blue Sunday (a story that for obvious reasons has been haunting my thoughts,) The excommunicated Madonna.

Where else do stories end so bitterly sweetly as in The Little World. Take the end of The Man Without A Head “Anyhow, the headless man acquired a head. Was it rightly his or not? The main thing is that it pacified him and he no longer inflamed the popular imagination. And the great rolling river quietly carried one more story, like a dead leaf, down to the sea.”

And where else can a story of political strife end this way (Peppone is the communist mayor and Don Camillo’s natural enemy.) “At this point Smilzo rode up like a deomon on his motorcycle, having been worried over his chief’s delay. When he saw the little procession, he turned around and rode ahead of it, in order to clear the way. When they were within two miles of their destination he responded to a nod from Peppone by stepping on the gas and leaving the others behind him.

So it was that at the entrance to the village Don Camillo found the local band ready to greet him. And the Crucified Christ came home to the strains of the “International.”
“Under the rope and to victory!” rejoiced Peppone bringing the jeep to an abrupt stop in front of the church door.”

When the world is too scary outside, I pull Guareschi over me like a blanket and pray that it might always be so in the real world — horrible tension, but real humans underneath, and redemption not far behind.