Jo Boone Reads and Writes

Newsletter #8

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Jo Boone Reads:

Sometimes, I hear other readers tell the story of when they first learned to read; of that magical moment when the incomprehensible letters sorted themselves out into words, and the words into sentences, and the sentences into stories.

I’m a little jealous of the people who have those memories.

I don’t remember learning to read. According to my mother, I talked early, speaking in complete sentences and having full conversations with adults at eighteen months old. I also memorized just about any words I encountered. My parents would sing to me at bedtime, and I would memorize the songs and sing along with them and not go to sleep. So, they kept having to come up with songs I did not know. By the time I was old enough to just listen and go off to sleep without joining in, they had dug deeply enough into their repertoire to be embarrassed by the songs I knew all the words to. My favorite was “Poor Butterfly” (my mother declared it “dreadful,” but she and my dad both sang it more prettily than the linked rendition), but there was also “Julianne” (about a woman whose lover betrays her, leaving her undefended at a critical moment) and “They Call the Wind Mariah,” from the 1969 movie musical “Paint Your Wagon” – the singer is “so far lost, not even God can find me!”

I memorized the books they read me in much the same way. They could not keep me in books. My mother tells me that she is not sure when I went from memorizing every book that was read to me, to actually reading, but it was some time before I hit Kindergarten. I don’t remember it, either.

For me, from before I can even remember, it was all about the words.

So, it should not be surprising when I tell you that comic books never really appealed to me. In fact, when so much of the story is told in images, I actually found it hard to follow. I would occasionally give comic books a try, only to shrug and wonder what people enjoy about them.

As an adult, I had a child who struggled with reading. In my efforts to help her engage with books, I discovered graphic novels, and bought every graphic-novel adaptation of her assigned school reading that I could get my hands on. It seemed to help her, but graphic novels still felt like incomplete stories to me. I wanted more verbal description, more exposition.

Then I married a man who reads media tie-in graphic novels. At one time, his collection of DC comic books exceeded 70,000 issues. The book he gave me, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds The Illyrian Enigma #1-4, These are different from graphic-novel adaptations of classic novels; the stories are less dense. They’re also different from comic books; there are fewer panels, and the art is less cluttered. So when he pressed one into my hands that filled in a gap between season one and season two of one of our favorite streaming shows (Strange New Worlds), I gave it a chance.

I think “graphic novel” feels a bit exaggerated; it seems more to me like a “graphic short story.” But it’s fun, and the art contributed to the story for me, rather than being inscrutable and perplexing. I enjoyed it, and if you’re a Strange New Worlds fan, I recommend it.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but I’m no pup, and I am finally learning to enjoy books that tell their stories in images as much or more than in words. That’s a pretty neat trick, I think, for someone as steeped in words as I have always been.

Jo Boone Writes

So, I did this dumb thing that I sometimes do. I am one of the teachers for my Sunday School class at church, and we were discussing what to do this fall. And I could have said something usual, like “why don’t we study 1 Peter?” or “How about a study of grief?” You know, something for which there are probably plenty of serviceable teaching outlines and booklets readily available that would make our lives as teachers easier. But no. I get bored with the usual stuff. I said, “You know, I grew up going to church, and learning Bible stories and stuff, but it took me a long time, well into adulthood, to really understand the Bible in a ‘big picture’ way. Like, understanding that it’s not strictly chronological, and that it was written by a lot of different people over more than a thousand years and some of it was earlier oral tradition and some of it was written down at about the time it happened, and why it has different genres in it, and how all of those stories fit together in a cohesive way, and I think we should do a study that explicitly addresses all of that.”

This is not something that comes in a convenient prepackaged study for adult Sunday School classes. So, on a Saturday that I could have spent writing the next Combined Service book, I instead wrote from scratch a lesson placing the Bible in its historical context as a religious book, alongside other religious books.

I gotta quit doing that to myself. After all, I want to see how Charlie’s next adventure plays out at much as you do!

Until next time,