Exposition
Like many other people I know, I’ve been spending a lot of time at home lately. To help pass the time, I’ve decided to build a book collection. This prompted the question, which books should I acquire for this collection? Well, I like Ann Rice’s vampire series, Stephen King is good too, but I also want to incorporate some classics. The Wizard of Oz, The Jungle Book, plus let us not forget genre favorites like pirate lore and ghost stories. And so the research has begun.
Rising Action, Climax & Falling Action
First, was to track down the stories themselves. I wanted the original unabridged versions, complete in every detail, just as the author intended. I found many interesting things, among which was that some of the stories I loved had sequels I never knew about, while others were originally intended to be a collection of short stories that somehow later got compiled into one cohesive novelization, and some represented very small parts of some very large author catalogs. To get even more information on these stories I started looking up authors, reading their bio’s and so forth, and that’s when things got sticky… and this question arose, “What do you do when you love a story someone wrote, but absolutely abhor the author who wrote it?” I don’t have the answer, in fact, I am still facing this dilemma.
Anybody who is on Twitter, and who loves the Harry Potter series but can’t stand it’s author J.K. Rowling is probably familiar with this love/hate relationship. Favorited characters and stories are many times connected to some very fond memories over time. only for the reader to find out later that the person who wrote the stories is fundamentally at odds with them as a person in real life. This causes an internal ethical struggle and in some cases ruins the stories and memories for them all together.
Resolution
So the journey continues and the blog begins. I am going to continue to do research for my new library and will be using this blog to document my discoveries along the way. With current times, racial tensions, revisionist history, or simply left out history being uncovered, I think a lot of people are going to be surprised (such as I was) about the left out details or untold stories that surround some of their favorite literary works. This might have them looking at these old classics and other books, in new and different ways than they were before. Adding context, complication, and the varying degrees of flawed or growing humanity to the story.