Memories of Books Past

I flip between books simultaneously, being enamored of certain areas and wanting to explore them further, from junk fiction to intricate nonfiction.  I'm not much for literary fiction, as my life is far more dynamic (mostly not by choice)  than the concerns of characters who are experiencing existential crises about ... something. 

Electronic books make flipping easier, so that I can lie in bed deciding whether I want to read Michael Connolly’s latest, or pick up again where I left Ong's Orality book, or something else.  I do have problems staying up sometimes, especially getting in more than a couple pages, and my iPad where those ebooks are will slip out of my grasp as I fall asleep, and clunk me in my nose, which regular books do better, as they fall more gently when I fall asleep with them, the pages and binding lessening the force of their descent.

But enough about books falling on noses at bedtime.  Recently, just because, I revisited The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on the iPad.  The last time I read it through, I was about 8, and just been given a volume of The Complete Sherlock Holmes on Christmas morning, and I didn’t move for the rest of Christmas day while I sat in front of the fire in our old stone colonial house in Bala Cynwyd, in a big easy chair, ignoring the snow and cold outside, and eating an entire box of Fruit Loops as I read.  Here, from The Red Headed League, is the denouement of the bad guy, who Holmes noted, was the fourth, or perhaps third, smartest man in London:

Over the edge there peeped a clean-cut, boyish face, which looked keenly about it, and then, with a hand on either side of the aperture, drew itself shoulder-high and waist-high, until one knee rested upon the edge. In another instant he stood at the side of the hole and was hauling after him a companion, lithe and small like himself, with a pale face and a shock of very red hair.

“It’s all clear,” he whispered. “Have you the chisel and the bags?  Great Scott! Jump, Archie, jump, and I’ll swing for it!” Sherlock Holmes had sprung out and seized the intruder by the collar.

When I reread that, and so many other similar passages just recently, the memories of that  almost perfect Christmas Day of my childhood came flooding back.

If you would like a quick vacation, and not just lose yourself in a work, but lose yourself in your memories of your first encounter with the work, I would highly recommend that you revisit some of those books that you read a long time ago.  Analogously, think Proust and madeleines.