A Wrinkle in Time

Even when I was young, I loved to read. I'd lie in bed all day and night reading, Back when I was 9 or 10, a student teacher had noticed my loved for fantasy books and recommended A Wrinkle in Time to me. I didn't notice the themes that I do now, knowing only that it was a good read. Rereading it again hasn't diminished it, but I do see things differently then when I was younger. The scene in which a boy is being tortured whenever he bounced his ball out of rhythm is particularly disturbing now, when I glossed over it on my first read all those years ago. Even the eerieness of an entire town acting in unison on Camazotz seems more provoking now then it did back then. And as with anything related to when you were a kid, the book itself just seems smaller now, but that's just because it is in comparison to the books that I read nowadays.

I guess the book spoke more to me cause at times I felt like Meg, though not for the same reasons. I always felt like the outcast during my Elementary and Junior High days because in each grade, I'd be at a different school. At most I'd stay for a grade and a half before I'd be moving again. I've only ever stayed in one school for High School, and for now University. But back then, I felt different from everyone else. I didn't get to reinvent myself each time though. As a b00k I recently read stated, "It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you." Excuse the informal citation, but page 104 of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.

The concept of the tesseract was one that I found amazing, and the passage in which Meg is taught what it is I could still remember all these years later, before I reread the book. The wrinkling of the hem on Mr. Whatsit's dress to allow the ant to cross from one point to another helped me to better understand where all the other science fiction books and shows were getting at when they talked about wormholes or the like. Something else particularly cool about the tesseract is the 3D model (or rather a 3D model of a 4D object on a 2D plane). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxl6TOLxvuI

Anyways I'm glad that I got to read Wrinkle for a class, and it reminded me that not all good books are meant solely for adults.And because of this, I recently picked up The Graveyard Book, and was reminded that children's literature can hold as much meaning as literature aimed at adults, and be just as entertaining.