At some point before grade 6, I found myself accompanying my parents to a gathering at the home of a man who had no children. While the grown-ups did their grown-up mingling, I lurked on the stairs, alone, absolutely mesmerized by a shelf filled with dragons. The figurines were all shapes and sizes, and chief among them was a glorious Chinese dragon in eye-popping reds and yellows. The host of the party stopped by to tell me with pride how he had assembled them from kits and painted them. He said if I liked dragons, he had a book for me - and he handed me Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffery. It had the most beautiful dragon on the cover I had ever seen - a cover that would eventually lure me off to art school.
But I read only the first page. Ugh. Reading that book, at that early stage in my reading, was like trying to swim upstream against maple syrup. The beautiful cover sat on my bedside table for months, mocking me.
My parents had already read me the Lord of the Rings. That, plus a better-left-forgotten animated movie called the Flight of Dragons had left me famished for the mythical creatures. The library, however, was no help. There were books about babysitters, books about kids my age going to school, and books about motorcycle-riding mice; but the dragons flew above in a strata of fiction that was as-yet out of my reach.
In order to get to those dragons, I read like gangbusters. There was one morning when I recall waking up, grabbing the half-finished book on my bedside (it was the one with the motorcycle-riding mouse), finishing it, and then grabbing a second book and reading it to the mid-point. Then I went down for breakfast.
The day that I picked up the Hobbit and realized that I could read it, I was done with those “kid’s books.” I rolled directly into the Lord of the Rings in that summer before the sixth grade, and from there into the adult fantasy and science fiction section in the library.
My reading comprehension at that point was rubbish. I was willing to hack my way through in order to get to the good bits with the dragons. My vocabulary exploded, despite the fact that I routinely embarrassed myself with mispronunciations when I attempted to use my fancy new words.
Because they were easier than McCaffery’s works, I ended up reading several series of fantasy books that I am not even sure I want to mention by name. The Xanth books. The MythAdventures books. The Landover books. I wasn’t under the impression then or now that those books were written for young adults specifically. They seem more to have been written for mostly-adult readers who wanted a fluffy bit of action, a fantastic setting, and all problems resolved nicely at the end. And there really wasn’t anything more to them then that. They were the literary equivalent of candy.
Those books had dragons, and dragons were what I wanted.
In my haste for dragons, however, I was missing out. Real, quality literature of an age-appropriate level was being published, only I never bothered with that section in the bookstore, because there weren’t dragons on the covers or between them.
I missed out on other genres. I missed out on the Newbury award-winners. I missed out on the novels for the youngest readers because that window of my life opened and shut so quickly that there was hardly time for anything to blow in.
It is only just now, as a parent, that I am reading Ramona Quimby, Age 8.
I have finally matured enough that I can read children’s literature and enjoy it, even if it doesn’t have dragons.
