When reading was best

From an article in the City Paper on reading:

"You know, I'm an English lit major, but I've never loved any books like the ones I loved when I was 12 years old."

Ray Bradbury once said that 10 or 11 is the best time of life because that is when we can completely disappear into a book and forget anything else. I know I could. In the sixth grade I spent two solid weeks reading The Lord of the Rings, thinking of nothing else the whole time. Not long before then I read Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles and the Narnia books. In the seventh and eight grades I read stacks of fantasy novels but little that really grabbed me; what I remember best is the science fiction, especially Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov.

The City Paper piece also discusses adolescent reading, things like Vonnegut, Salinger and Ayn Rand that captivate 16 to 20-year-olds. I missed that phase. Most of those books are cyncial, and by then I already regarded it as old news that adult society is hypocritical and corrupt. I was looking for something more positive, but on the other hand I had never patience for simple solutions like the one Ayn Rand peddled.

I feel it as a sort of character flaw that I have never been able to enjoy reading the kind of adult novels that deal with life in all its complexity. Tolstoy bored me, Dostoevsky repelled me, and I have never gotten around to Proust. The books I have loved most in the past twenty years have mostly been non-fiction. I can think of only one real exception, and that is 100 Years of Solitude. I bet one of the reasons that book has such a huge worldwide audience is that many grownups have been able, as I was, to disappear into its world in just the way they did with their favorite books when they were 11. For that, if nothing else, Garcia Marquez deserves his Nobel prize.

But, honestly, if I am down or burdened and need something to comfort me or distract me, I still turn to the books I loved when I was 11.