KNOW NO BARRYS.
a pick six
by Hunter Jon
Books are the best. Especially those first ones. Those ones you read on your own as soon as you were able to. Ones with actual chapters and hardly any pictures - sometimes none at all. It’s a cool moment when you realize you have your very own taste. I think you always do, but when you become aware of it and adjust your life accordingly - that is identity rearing it’s head. I’m not sure how it is these days, but when I was a wee one this transition could most distinctly be spotted by simply watching what a child chose to read. More so than movies, television, music or any other form of entertainment/art one can consume, a person’s book preference, especially a kid’s, can tell you almost everything. Because books are serious business. Unlike watching a movie or listening to a song, reading an entire book is quite the commitment. An even bigger one for a kid. A huge one if you were a kid like me and reading wasn’t a breeze but something really hard. To this day I remain a slow reader whose attention drifts elsewhere far too easily. Let’s see if we agree with this comparison: Say you’re watching a movie and after half an hour you decide you don’t care for it. Some may turn it off immediately, but some will see it through just for the hell of it. Just to have watched the entire thing before they form their final opinion. I think this is a lot less likely the case if you’re forty pages into a book and realize you don’t like it. I bet most of you would stop reading right there. Seeing a book through is a bigger reflection of your personal taste than that episode of “WKRP...” you watched because nothing else was on. So, when you reach the age that adults stop reading books to you and you are able or desire to personally and privately read whatever you want, what you pick is extremely telling. Even more so if you choose to read that book a second time. I’ve read very few books twice (or more) in my life. So each one that I have holds very important meaning to me. They are part of my individuality that I began forming as a child. Forming by the way of books, including these all time favourites…
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I like to think I was drawn to this book because of the processed cheese packets so prominently depicted on the cover. And, in the cartoon context, they seem to be a form of contraband. I related to this. In my house we called these single, plastic wrapped slices “fake cheese”. I had a particular taste for them which my mother found appalling (she bought them though, so…). Therefore frantically running out of any given back door with packs of fake cheese stacked in my arms - “I got ‘em! Start the car, Barry! Start the car!!” - was something I could see myself doing. However, the one thing I couldn’t relate to in this crime scene was the size of the two kids. Sometimes you just can’t explain something other than to say you must have had a mild psychic moment. I would go on to extremely relate to the young guys in this book and their struggles with weight and food in general. But, like I said, I had absolutely no reason to then. So looking back it’s a bit of a mystery to me as to why I identified with this book so very much. Other than the simple fact that it’s a wonderful, accurate tale of youth. It was first read to me by my mother and then I read it twice on my own. It’s one of the funnier books I’ve ever read and certainly the funniest on this list of six. It manages to pull off that wonderful trick of putting a character through a series of impossibly hard emotional obstacle courses, but instead of pitying them and depressing yourself in the process you laugh hysterically. With them, not at them - that’s key. Kimmel Smith has another book about and aimed at youth called “Chocolate Fever” that I also adore.
P.S. I know no Barrys.
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Despite movies being the primary interest of my life for as long as I can remember, for the majority of my childhood I dreamed of becoming a professional cartoonist. I pretty much spent all my free time drawing. When I watched a movie or TV show I was drawing the characters. I was never particularly great at it, but I was just good enough to keep the dream alive. So when this book was given to me by my mum it seemed too good to be true. It was as if someone had written a book just for me. About me, even. Then I actually read the thing (all by myself) and it turned out to be so much more than just a perfect title. It’s a truly beautiful book. I went so far as to carry it around with me wherever I went for a good few months, just in case I felt like suddenly reading one of my favourite bits in it. I read it fully multiple times and often did so proudly at school, my feet up on my desk, making sure the cover and title could be seen by all. “That’s right everyone… just reading my perfect book here… I’m so sorry to hear that you don’t have one of your own.” Much to my delight my teacher took notice once, saying that I looked like the kid on the cover. “Just swap out the brown hair for blonde and that yellow shirt for a red one and it’s you,” she observed. Greatest moment of my life right there. Fast forward to me being ten and adapting this book for the big screen. A very loose adaptation, mind you… that was only eight minutes long. But I considered it my narrative directorial debut and I guess it still sort of is. It remains the only time I’ve attempted to adapt someone else’s material.
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Either my sister or I must have thrown a tantrum on the other’s birthday at some point when we were really little, because there was a tradition in our family that my sister would get one small gift on my birthday so that she wouldn’t feel left out or unloved and vice versa. So on her eleventh birthday, at the age of nine myself, I was presented with my little gift. It was obviously a book. Ah, nuts. I was hoping for anything but a book. You could talk Mum into buying you a book any old time. This was the occasion for toys, people. Anyway, I opened it and studied the cover. “Henry Potter” I muttered, actually intrigued. “I think it’s Harry, isn’t it?” asked my mum, leaning over to look. “Oh, sorry. Yeah - Harry Potter,” I said, embarrassed that I’d read it wrong. “I read about it in the paper. It’s supposed to be really good”, my mum offered enthusiastically. Indeed, it did look kind of neat. Trains were cool and this one was red. The kid had a scar or something. And the word “philosopher” was new to me. I turned it around. On the back was a wizard with very long brown beard smoking a pipe. Who was he? I looked forward to finding out. I never did. That’s right - early editions featured a man, middle aged at most, with a brown beard down to his toes on the back. This caused a lot of confusion as he didn’t match any character in the book. Too slight to be Hagrid. Too young to be Dumbledore. Was it meant to be Harry grown up or something? No one knew and they still don’t. Mystery Man’s imagine has been replaced with Dumbledore’s on all printings since. These early editions have come to be known as “brown beard copies” and are a little bit of a collector’s item. But I digress. I loved the book and it changed the world.
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We had to read this book in grade six. I hated when we had to read books for school because I could never get through them at the pace that was expected of me. But that was not the case with this. I read it in two weeks, by far the fastest I’d ever read a whole book, and then immediately read it a second time in a week and a half. I just loved it. One of many, many reasons was that I thought it broke the rules of a book. Some of the chapters were a page or two long. One was, like, half a page. This was revolutionary to me. And the story itself had everything I could have asked for at that age. It’s sort of my generation’s “Treasure Island” and “The Goonies” rolled into one - the rough, rotten, ragtag adventure of a lifetime. Buried treasure. Vengeful cowgirls. Poisonous lizards. Onions. But it also ever so slyly introduced me to the reality of slavery in America and was probably the first interracial love story I was ever told. Great stuff.
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It’s probably one of the ten best books ever written, right? I think so.
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I read the wrong one first. I guess. I can’t at all remember how this book landed in my hands but it did and I read it and it blew me away. I must have been about ten. So technically being a teenager was a few years off but I use this book as a marker of my maturity. I picked it up as a boy and put it down as a guy. Does that make sense? It was by far the most grown up thing I’d read, even though it’s a tale of teens. For a pretty sheltered, privileged kid it was so raw, gritty and intense that it kind of scared me a little. Which only made it more exciting, badass and cool. It’s dark, violent tone was an awakening. I’d seen movies where people got beat up and bled or mildly cursed and so on. But I’d never read those kinds of scenes or words on a page. It was after I’d read it for a second time and loved it even more that I decided I needed to check out this other one by the same author that was mentioned on the cover. I got someone to buy me my very own copy of “The Outsiders” and for a very long time it was my favourite book I’d ever read. However, I was at that point aware that it had come first and therefore was probably supposed to have been read first. This bothered me for a long time. I’d read them in the wrong order, I thought. But I’ve since come to terms with it. Watching “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” before the first one, though - that still haunts me. Speaking of franchises of that sort, they were the only kind of thing I was familiar with when it came to sequels, prequels, etc. But Hinton’s books were connected in a much quieter way. This was totally new to me. She created what we now often call a “shared universe”. Something comparable to what was happening in comic books. But I didn’t read enough of those as a kid to ever notice any significant crossover. So S.E. was the first person to tell me stories where a character in one would casually mention an event or characters from another. I fell in love with this concept and with her for, in my young mind, inventing it. Although I still think “The Outsiders” is a better book, this was the first one I ever read (and thankfully loved) that didn’t feel like it was for kids. And you never forget your first, I’m told. True, I tell.
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