Edith confronts evil

In books. Of course. This is the kid, after all, who when I call home and ask about her day, gives me play-by-play accounts of the story in the last two movies she has seen and an equally detailed account of the imaginary sharks and whale at the bottom of the pool at day camp, and how she got away from each. (Since this history of the pool marine life was offered with relish rather than fear, I felt comforted that day camp on balance had added color and not terror to her week.)

Indeed, Edith's reading recently has had her engaging with the forces of good versus evil in all their fantastical, melodramatic splendor. Remember this post just five summers ago? How much has changed!

We've already mentioned her tour with Tom this past winter through Lord of the Rings. Although their process through the first book continues slowly, they watched the movie trilogy a full (ahem) five times in a row before taking a breather.

As summer began we decided to try Harry Potter. Edith had been apprehensive about it, but the minute we started the first book and encountered the Dahl-worthy horribleness of Harry's relatives, Edith was hooked. She has finished the first two books, and we're trying to decide just how far we can go before it gets too frightening. On the one hand, dramatic myths of Good versus Bad speak to something in Edith--the same something, of course, that has made children across time reach for fairy tales and fantasy stories. She's far more frightened by realistic dramas in which an ordinary child seems poised to get in trouble with grown-ups for a minor infraction than she is haunted by Orcs or Voldemort. Nevertheless, we've been warned that the death of good guys is coming in subsequent volumes, and that might violate her sense that It All Turns Out Okay. So we'll see.

Meanwhile, I started listening to Frankenstein in the car last month, never having read it and having seen it available on CD at the library. I began turning it off when Edith would join me in the car so that we could converse, but of course, in the few seconds it was on she gathered it was a story, and soon she wanted to listen. I filled her in on what she'd missed, and she urged me to play it whenever we were in the car. To be sure, early 19th-century prose tend to be somewhat beyond the 21st-century child's grasp. But that didn't bother Edith. She'd listen for a few minutes, then ask me to stop the CD and explain. So that became our pattern. Sometimes she'd let me know how much she'd understood herself, and sometimes she'd wait for me to fill in everything. Oftentimes I felt like one of those translators in a sketch comedy routine, where one speaker talks for a full minute, then the translator turns and grunts two syllables. "Really? That's all that happened in all that time?" Edith would ask. "Nineteenth-century authors liked to use a lot of words," I'd say.

We didn't finish the book before I departed for Kentucky, so Edith had me fill her in over the phone in the evenings. On the day I finished, I related the end, the tragedy of both Frankenstein and the monster bent on killing each other, yet both alone and heart-broken, really living only for each other.

"Yeah," she said, "sometimes when you lose a thing or when a person dies, you only appreciate after they're gone how much you really counted on them."

I asked her how she'd become so wise.

"Well, you know," she said. "That's the way it is in books."

Indeed. My own daughter proves my conviction that reading expands not only our exposure to places and events but our sympathies as well. Well-wrought books enlarge our capacity to understand others' perspectives, I believe, far more than daily life alone will ever give most of us a chance to do.

Then there are books that offer too much knowledge. In addition to battles between good and evil, Edith still loves horses, and there are horse books aplenty in bluegrass country. But the books here may be overmuch for the young horse-worshipper-from-afar. You start to get an idea of the kind of place you're in when the first display in the big local bookstore features such hits as The Complete Book of Horse Bits, Guiding Your Mare through Her First Foaling, and Hoof Care for New Horse Owners. Then there are biographies of individual horses whose names evidently are supposed to be advertisement enough (and I don't mean just Secretariat and Seabiscuit), and detailed guides to bluegrass horse farms. I passed one family leaning over the table and scanning the index of such a book to see which of their friends had made it in.

All of which is to say, while Voldemort is best encountered in the pages of a novel, for the average Jane there probably are some things better experienced in person than in print. I wish Edith could be here.