{"id":24099,"date":"2012-04-20T13:47:31","date_gmt":"2012-04-20T03:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.booktopia.com.au\/?p=24099"},"modified":"2016-03-01T09:48:37","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T23:48:37","slug":"from-the-archives-reading-in-the-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2012\/04\/20\/from-the-archives-reading-in-the-dark\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Archives: Reading in the Dark"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When I was a teen dark had to be dark dark, it had to be midnight or nothing\u2026 twilight could never be dark enough.<\/p>\n

And it had to be real\u2026 not like reality TV \u2018real\u2019\u2026 but real, as in authentic. Yes, it had to be dark and it had to be real.<\/p>\n

Which meant it had to be true. More true than the truths teachers and parents were trying to teach. More true than any camera could capture. More true than was good for the young to know.<\/p>\n

But what was \u2018it\u2019?<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019 was big ideas. Ideas we angrily supposed our elders were too complacent to address or teach.<\/p>\n

So we turned to books.\"Hunger\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Which books?<\/p>\n

Books from Northern Europe, where long dark winters encouraged long dark thoughts. We sought such literature, for it had an edge to it, a bite, and it had the power to transform us into creatures of the night.<\/p>\n

Yes, we were to become intellectuals.<\/p>\n

We found novels like:<\/p>\n

Knut Hamsun\u2019s Hunger<\/a> – <\/em>whose protagonist puts art before the necessities of life and works stubbornly to earn his bread by the pen alone, starving in the process.<\/p>\n

Hermann Hesse\u2019s Steppenwolf<\/a>, <\/em>which pointed out that a bourgeois or suburban existence was, in fact, a living death.<\/p>\n

Maxim Gorky\u2019s My Childhood<\/a>, <\/em>a horror story so real that we went to bed suddenly thankful for our suburban birth.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And all of Fyodor Dostoyevsky<\/a>\u2019s novels from Devils<\/a>, The Idiot<\/a> <\/em>and Notes from Underground<\/a> <\/em>to Crime and Punishment<\/a>, The House of the Dead<\/a> <\/em>and The Brothers Karamazov<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Our minds were hungry and we needed substance. We read Penguin Classics<\/a>, Penguin Modern Classics<\/a>, Picadors, Vintage Classics<\/a>, Oxford Classics etc\u2026<\/p>\n

Of course, there were casualties; a few went wild for the Marquis de Sade, whose Philosophy of the Boudoir<\/em><\/a> and 120 Days of Sodom<\/em><\/a> left some readers with unsightly facial tics and bizarre sexual practices. Some fell for Ayn Rand\u2019s The Fountainhead<\/em><\/a> and took to goose-stepping about the place because they didn\u2019t read the antidote to Rand, Sinclair Lewis\u2019 Babbitt<\/em><\/a>. And then there were those dullards who preferred Sartre\u2019s Nausea<\/em><\/a> to Camus\u2019 The Outsider<\/em><\/a>!<\/p>\n

But on the main this diet of dark reading made us happy, happier than our friends who sought solace in Stephen King or Virginia Andrews. We were happier because our reading made us feel important, active, relevant and because we were being challenged and intellectually stimulated.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fanciful creatures of the night are immortal, but sadly, the real creatures of the night, teen intellectuals, live but briefly, for just as they begin to burn most brightly they are cut down by toxic adult responsibilities – responsibilities, however, for which they are well prepared.<\/p>\n

Ten More Novels To Sink Your Teeth Into<\/strong><\/p>\n