Reading fiction

I just finished reading Lord of the Rings, actually making it all the way to the end, for the first time in my life. That I can remember. My dad read it to my sister and I when we were kids, but I was so young I don't remember anything except sitting on the bed, listening to his voice, and carefully paging through his copy of The Atlas of Middle Earth to see the locations of some of the places in the story. But that was about it.

I actually made it most of the way through the books when I was in middle school, when the Peter Jackson movies were coming out. The way I remembered it, I read each book in the year before the movie came out so I was prepared to see them. And I distinctly remember seeing Return of the King in theaters with a particular set of friends, so naturally I "remembered" finishing the third volume of the series. But a few months ago, as I began reading the third volume, I realized I had no memory of what I was reading.

That's when I realized I had never finished the books. At 30 years old, I realized I was, in fact, reading Lord of the Rings for the first time, really. This was the fictional universe that came up weekly in our house. I clearly remember the gathering with family friends, almost certainly for a D&D game which I was too young to participate in, watching the original teaser trailer for The Fellowship of the Ring in an embedded Quicktime viewer window, since YouTube was still a few years away.

I thought I knew these books. I had told myself I knew these books.

What is perhaps more strange is what drew me out of my complacence and made me think, despite having no shortage of books on my to-read shelf, that I should take a detour of 600 pages to re-read something I thought I had "already read."

I can actually trace it back to scuba diving.

In December 2018, Steph and I took a 7-day cruise from Puerto Rico around the Caribbean, and on one of the stops, did a "Discover Scuba" dive where, guided by a certified diver and after a simple training course on the basics of Scuba, you can go on a relatively short dive, going to a maximum depth of 40 feet.

(Typically Scuba requires you to be certified before diving on your own, but I can only surmise they realized that can been a high barrier to dabblers. Indeed, this was the second time Steph and I had done one of these, but the previous time was two years before. As fun as it is, I don't know we'll do another any time soon, so the work of getting certified wouldn't really be justified.)

One of the things I quite liked about scuba diving was how quiet it is. You're floating relatively weightlessly (thanks to the BCD) and all you can really hear is the hissing of your in-breaths and roiling bubbling of your out-breaths. All I had to do was float along, take in the sights, and keep breathing. And just like the breathing emphasis in meditation, something about drawing your conscious mind to the repetitive in-and-out of airflow leaves your mind free to wonder. It was delightful and I would highly recommend it to anyone given the opportunity.

But the spark of me re-reading The Lord of the Rings happened once we were out of the water and on the boat returning to the harbor. Everyone was tired and exhausted and the conversation was sparse, but the crew of the boat were bantering with each other since this was just another day at the office for them. The diver who had led the group of three Discover Scuba folks including Steph and myself was telling the diver who was driving the boat all about the rare octopus that we had seen during our dive that was apparently very unusual to see at that particular dive site.

As they joked back and forth about showing it to someone on one of the other dive boats run by this same company, and plans for the evening and the rest of the weekend, a thought came to me, more or less fully formed:

They live in Neverland.

This is the place where the lost boys go to never grow up.

The crew of three divers on our boat were good at what they do. They were courteous, professional, efficient, and helpful. But taking tourists and strangers out on one dive charter after another is a job, not a career. It's what you do when you love diving so much you want to do it every day (but aren't independently wealthy).

The crew of the boat were fit, 30ish, and happy. But I couldn't shake the feeling that they were in stasis, not maturing and never moving forward. They would stay in Neverland for as long as they wanted, but when they came out they would be as mature as they were the day they entered.

Hard times and commitments and making sacrifices are what make us grow as people. Choosing between what you want to do and what you have to do. It's waiting another month, another year to do the thing you want to because you have to pay off your credit cards or save up for a new car.

And I didn't see any of that in these people. Maybe it was there, but in the moment, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was looking at a few Lost Boys (and Girls) stuck in Neverland.

But then I had to challenge myself. Before you criticize others, examine yourself. I thought: What if I'm wrong? What I if I don't actually understand what Peter Pan was saying about Neverland. Better find out. I remembered seeing the Disney Peter Pan movie as a kid, but I intuited that the source for the most direct truth would be the book, the original authorial intent of an individual man. So that night, back on the cruise ship, I pulled out my Kindle, the only source of reading material I'd brought, and found a copy of the book to buy and started reading.

What I found was a much stranger book than I was expecting, with a number of subtle comments that hinted this not simply a simple book for children. On one page, I read, "[Peter] did not alarm [Wendy], for she thought she had seen him before in the faces of many women who have no children." The book turned out to be full of this types incisive commentaruy. It was also generally much more grim than I had expected, talking directly about the nature of children and the consequences of never growing up.

The next evening, we came back into port in San Juan, and after a day out sightseeing, as I was sitting in the airport waiting for our delayed flight, I started to wonder again.

If Peter Pan has this much to say about reality, what about other fiction books? What about Lord of the Rings?

For years, I had mostly eschewed fiction books as unproductive escapism. The last time I had indulged in it, I read the first two Game of Thrones books, which seemed deliberately circuitous and gratuitous, and not particularly incisive. Entertaining but not enlightening. I was 25 when I gave up on those, which was also more or less the time I retired from computer games for similar reasons. There was so much to do and so much to learn, what was the point of spending time on the intellectual equivalent of empty calories?

But now, having started to read Peter Pan, I began to wonder if I had thrown the baby out with the bath water. Was there fiction that was true? True in the sense that it told stories that never happened about real types of people or real types of situations and had something to teach even if the particulars of the story never happened?

Peter Pan certainly seemed to offer some of that. So, then, what would be a good second test case? The Lord of the Rings it is.

And so, on airport wifi, I found The Hobbit (might as well read that while I'm at it since the two are so related) and Lord of the Rings in Kindle form and downloaded them.

I ended up finishing Peter Pan in three days, and started immediately on the Hobbit. I made it about halfway through reading on the Kindle before realizing that it just didn't quite feel right. As luck would have it, 18 years ago my father bought me my own box set of the four Tolkien books, and I had carried it forward with me from dorm rooms to apartments to houses, and there it was, sitting 15 feet away from me on the shelf. So I put the Kindle down, picked up the book, and resumed reading.

And now, 8 months later, reading in rotation with a few other books, I've finished Return of the King. Just like Peter Pan, the story moves along at a good clip but every chapter or two there will just be a moment of wisdom tossed in as an aside. ("The Men of the Mark do not lie, and therefore they are not easily deceived.") But clearly these asides have something to teach, of the type that no analytical treatise could.

Even today, The Lord of the Rings is one of the most enduringly popular series of books. Years after the current craze around Game of Thrones has passed, people will still be reading and studying Tolkien. The books that he wrote were not simply diverting entertainment. They contain moral fiber and lessons about the world beyond what's convenient or interesting. They are, in some way, meta-true. And that has given them staying power that other diverting but meaningless books lack.

This is actually troubling for me, because I definitely have no shortage of books to read. It was very convenient being able to insulate myself from temptation to dip into fiction, but now that I've gone back to read Peter Pan and Lord of the Rings I can't just write off the whole genre anymore.

Of course, this is a first-class first-world problem. Identifying and reading good fiction will probably be more enriching than some of the interesting-yet-forgettable non-fiction books that I convince myself to read. So in the long run I'm thankful to have learned the lesson.

It always stings a bit to realize you've believed something that wasn't quite true. But, you can't change the past. Just learn the lesson and make better decisions going forward.

That said, fiction books have to follow the normal rules and enter the to-read shelf at the back of the queue like everything else.

Unless of course I just decide to suspend the rules, like I did for Peter Pan.