A Good Story, Well Told
Very little else has ever changed the world.
Like a lot of Americans, I stayed up way too late last night watching the election returns. And today? Well. I didn’t have a second Donald Trump term on my bingo card for 2024.
But here we are. Here we are. Here. We. Are. And what I’ve had on my mind all day today is stories. The kind of stories that change things.
Foundational stories.
I’ve read Little Women nearly every years since I was ten years old. That was also the year I read Gone with the Wind, because it’s the book that Ponyboy read to Johnny is The Outsiders.
Judy Blume’s book Tiger Eyes changed me when I was in middle school. When I was thirteen I read the Flowers in the Attic series as the books were released. My step-mother bought them and I stole them when she was done.
Narnia and Middle Earth were my playgrounds.
I found a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale at a garage sale when I was a senior in high school. My dad gave me The Stand for my fourteenth birthday. I used to do his filing for him on Saturday mornings so that he’d give me twenty dollars and set me free all afternoon at the massive used book store a couple of blocks down.
