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Sometimes, while reading a good book I hear a buzzing, needling little voice floating around in the back of the mind. Every time I try to capture it, it quickly dissolves away. But it’s persistent and it generally ruins what would otherwise be a great reading experience.
I’ve spent the past two days completely riveted by this poignant and vivid story of a young Jewish girl and her brother. Newly christened Hansel and Gretel, they are abandoned by their stepmother and father in the woods of Poland. Their journey toward survival is so heartbreaking and so real that I found myself wrapped in a blanket in my warm armchair, still shivering along with these two cold children hidden under leaves and snow.
Just in case any of you were wondering if I had crushes on female authors. . .
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My science training tends to color my thought processes in strange and funny ways. Science is all about theories and the “facts” to support them (See Roberts Hooke and Boyle 1650-1703). It oftentimes seems to be at odds with my love of fiction, which requires a conscious suspension of disbelief (see also dramatic convention). Somehow though, my brain has learned to reconcile the two (see right vs. left brained funderstanding.com, 2007).
I love a well formatted document (Publication Manual, APA 2001) or a heavy tome about something interesting (see Selfish Gene, Dawkins, 2004). I also love an unabashed classic of literature (see Penguin Classics) but when a great novel comes along that tickles that sciency part of my brain, it’s a uniquely pleasurable experience (October, 2001).
We all have our essential qualities that drive us forward or trip us up, that make everything in life work or break down, but we don’t notice them because we’re too busy worrying about the price of gas or whether or not someone likes us back. It takes life starting over — something that rarely, if ever, happens — to make us look inside without the usual mundane distractions.
But when you die, return from the afterlife, save the universe a couple times, and finally come back to where you were at the start of it all — that’s a grand opportunity. Only in the funny books!
At the start of Green Lantern: No Fear, Hal Jordan has returned to his former life, but nothing is the same (the details of his previous life chapter aren’t important for the purposes of this story — ain’t that nice? — and there’s a recap at the beginning of the book if you must know). Coast City, his hometown, was destroyed by a super bad guy and is only partway through a troubled, halting reconstruction. His brothers and their families hardly know him. He has to earn his way back to the top of his former career as a test pilot. We’re reading about a rebirth, a starting back from Square One, so we get to see his essentials, and see ourselves in them as well. Of course, since this is a Green Lantern comic book, fear is the biggest player in Hal Jordan’s psyche. Writer Geoff Johns knows that this is, conveniently, the biggest player in our collective real world psyche as well.
