46 books

Every book is a portal out of here.

Previous birthday posts: 45 wishes, 44 thoughts about the future, 43 things, 42 / 42 admissions, 41 things.

—

One. I lie in bed as Ma read Dodie Smith’s ‌The Hundred and One Dalmatians to me. It was the fifth, and last, straight time; after this, she would finally put her foot down. Outside, in the Oxford dusk, the neighborhood dogs speak to each other over fences and hedges, the starlight barking in full force. Occasionally, a bird lands on the spiraling wrought iron fire escape outside.

It’s an old book, and the Romani people are not treated well in it. Revised versions are available. And, of course, the Disney versions.

Two. Nobody seems to want to adapt the anti nuclear war science fiction sequel, though, the cowards.

Three. I borrow ‌Constellations: Stories of the Future from the library for the third time: a hardback book in a protective plastic sleeve full of stories that seem almost illicit. One of the stories, ‌Let’s Go to Golgotha! is about a time-traveling tourist agency; the participants slowly realize that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is entirely made up of people from the future. ‌Beyond Lies the Wub was Philip K Dick’s first short story; a horror tale about meat-eating and possession. ‌It’s a Good Life, about a child with godlike powers, sets up a scenario that I still regularly think about. And Vonnegut’s ‌Harrison Bergeron is, of course, a layered classic, rife with mischief.

Outside the library, there’s still a bakery selling cheap bread rolls and jam donuts. (It’s a Primark now.) The smell is intoxicating but the stories already have me.

Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. I feel disconnected from the other children on the playground: like I’m missing a magic password that they know and I don’t. There’s no one big thing, but there are lots of little things; an idiom I don’t understand here, a reference I don’t get there. As an adult, I’ll have a name for what this is and why it’s true: third culture kid. But as a child, I just know that something is off.

‌The Dark is Rising sequence soft launches as a Blyton-esque adventure in Cornwall, and then dives into a story that is deeper than any of the culture I see around…