A great article from NPR, via the ever sharp-eyed Daughter Number Three:
The Unlikely Best-Seller: 'A Wrinkle In Time' Turns 50
One of my all-time favorites. My mom read it to me when I was young, maybe nine or ten, and oh - how I didn't want to hear it. I'm not sure what I wanted her to read me instead, probably some Sweet Valley Twins or other trendy ghost-written horror, but from the first line it had me.
"It was a dark and stormy night."
Yes, although I had not (and still haven't!) read Bulwer-Lytton, I had seen enough Peanuts strips to get it. And I think that's what I love about A Wrinkle in Time. It's not just the fact that I get something new out of it each time I read it, the older I get, it's not just that Meg is a true heroine (good at math! And a myopic heroine, who I totally identified with as I had my own giant coke-bottle glasses and various similar awkwardnesses at that point), but it's also that L'Engle never simplified things for me, even though she knew her readers wouldn't be physicists. Here are some big, important things you need to learn, she seemed to be saying, things like love and fear and heroism and trust and that indefinable yet instantly recognizable feeling of loss and horror that your parents can't protect you from everything, that they don't know everything.
In short: I love this book. If you haven't read it, you're missing out.
I also love that in NPR's picture, L'Engle's little granddaughter has big glasses like Meg's.
It's always been in the top ten books ever written, for me. I still re-read it about once a year :) [This is delphipsmith.livejournal.com but Blogger is still sending LJ authentication into an infinite loop...]
ReplyDeleteOh! Me, too! <3
ReplyDeleteI've been looking through Blogger's help stuff and there are other people having this issue - but I can't find a fix. Grrrr.