June has been a rough month for deaths.
A handful of celebrities and a few other notable people have passed, including my favorite author, David Eddings.
It's not that I am sad at his death (it is inevitable), or "the waste" (he was just shy of 78), or that "his voice was silenced" (His last novel was published shortly before his wife and collaborator died two years ago.).
I'm not sad, exactly. When I found out that he had died, I started thinking about my memories of his books. I started reading them a bit earlier than most people, although that might have been mostly due to my mother's frustration.
I'm not sure exactly when I learned to read. I know that I was doing word searches before I was in school, and I could sight-read (and sound out parts of) a lot of those words. (My grandmother used to cut out the children's word searches out of the newspaper for me.)
I know that I was reading in kindergarten, because I remember sitting with my teacher and her helping me with the words I didn't know. The school district I grew up in used phonics to supplement regular reading and language arts lessons, and by second grade, I had a good grasp on how to sound words out, and we used the classroom set of dictionaries often enough that I could look up any word was unsure of.
I think our language arts lessons might have been skewed towards the practical--we learned fairly early how to use context clues to guess at the meaning of unfamiliar words, but I do not know what the parts of speech are beyond noun, verb, adverb, and adjective. I'm sure there are more, but as I am not an English teacher, I don't let it keep me up at night.
The early lessons in context clues were extremely useful. A grade-school child can easily become frustrated with flipping through a dictionary every few paragraphs, but being able to think "Oh, that's a color...that's an emotion" makes dictionaries optional to understanding the story. Of course, when you understand the meaning of the word, sometimes your pronunciation falls short. My parents still tease me about some of my verbal mishaps. It turns out that the way it sounds in your head doesn't always match with the rest of the world.
The first time I really started reading was in second grade, when my aunt bought me a beautifully illustrated book of fairytales for Christmas. There was not a picture on every page, but all of them were lovely. The stories themselves were about halfway between Disney and Grimm. There weren't a lot of gory details, but not all of the endings were that happy, and some fairly awful things happened to the characters. This was definitely not the Little Mermaid who was chased around by a guppy and a crab. I was entranced. I finished the fairly thick book, and wanted to read more.
I started reading, a lot.
I went through the American Girls series's. I tore through Boxcar Children and Babysitter's Club. I didn't like Nancy Drew. As the town library was small, and not overly stocked, buying new books was the only way to keep in fresh reading material. My family was far from rich, so my mother started picking and choosing which of her books I was allowed to read. The bodice-rippers ended up in one pile, and everything else in the other.
My mother read me the first chapter of The Hobbit (it was too boring), the first chapter of Watership Down (it didn't make sense to me), and finally, the prologue of Pawn of Prophecy. That one got my attention. While I was only 8 at the time, I could see the similarities between that world and my Sunday School lessons. They were different, but there were similarities. I thought it was interesting.
I dived, headfirst, into Garion's world.
The themes fascinated me. The storytelling kept my attention. Eddings's somewhat dry wit and narrative voice appealed to me enormously (which might explain my occasionally odd sense of humor).
It took me almost a year to finish the first volume (the first three books) of The Belgariad. I wanted to read the second volume, but my mother didn't know where it was. I went back to the Babysitter's Club, but ideas about justice, morality, evil, and the power of the mind simmered in the back of my head.
That year, the same aunt who infected me with the reading bug in the first place, tracked down the last two books the series, and gave them to me for my birthday. She is still my favorite aunt to this day. Sacrifice and redemption were added to the ideas that were floating in the back of my mind.
As I grew up, I learned how to get the books I wanted, and I eventually collected the entire saga of Garion. I started to read Sparhawk's story, but it didn't interest me. Sparhawk was a crabby, middle-aged knight, while Garion was raised on a farm, and wasn't much older than me.
I ended up reading The Losers.
I thought it was awful. For some reason, I read it again. And a few more times. It was different. In the Belgariad, everything was laid out, rather simply. Understanding the Raphael's story was like pulling teeth. And yet, I wanted to figure it out. The message I finally pulled from the book shaped my general morality, to this day.
I eventually got back to Sparhawk, and the rest of his books, but I could see the flaws in them, and appreciate them anyway. The storytelling was comforting. The style and voice were like and old T-shirt that fits just right.
When Eddings died, his obituary (on a book website) listed his published works. I had read all but his first novel. Since it was completely out of print, I went to the library, to track it down by ILL if necessary.
The librarian who helped me with my request was upset when I told her that Eddings had died; it turned out that she and her husband hit it off on their first date when they discovered they were both fans.
I understood her sorrow, but I didn't really feel the same way. It's not that I'm glad he died, but come on: he was pretty old, his wife had died, and it's not like he promised to stick around forever.
I finished High Hunt a few days ago. The story was...something else, but the narration was nearly identical to the voice I remembered. And that's what I miss.
It wasn't the stories, it was the storyteller that made the difference all along.
