The Mysterious Allure of a Good Read

On Friday afternoon, when I left the office for a blissful three day weekend, I had three things on my mind: 1) football game traffic 2) sleep and 3) a good book. I was meeting Mom at the optical shop to pick up some new glasses. God bless her, she said she wanted me there to advise on her choice of frames so that she didn't walk out looking like a granny. Afterward, she wanted to stop by the library just down the street and pick up another title by the mystery author she's been reading, so I followed along behind her.

The week before, when roaming St. Louis, Jenn and I stopped into Left Bank, an independent bookstore. There, among the young adult staff picks was The Mysterious Benedict Society. The cover was intriguing and so I read over the dust jacket. I wrote down the title and author on a slip of paper in my purse so I wouldn't forget it.

So standing in the A-town library taking in that familiar smell that hadn't washed over me in more than a decade, I started digging through my bag for that errant scrap of paper. I looked it up, tracked it down and took home the almost-500-page tome.

And I just finished it. It reminded me a bit of Harry Potter - the way unlikely friendships are rendered, the inherent battle between good and evil and the position that children are far more clever and reliable than what they seem. (Now, Potter fans, I'm in no way indicating that the boy wizard has been equaled, but without any more trips to Hogwarts, I have to read something...). The great thing about The Mysterious Benedict Society is that it's got that same quality of an unlikely reality rendered in the real world - it's not a mystical fairy land. It also plays into - as I've discussed before - that secret hope we all harbor that we are more than we seem.

While some of the books themes read benignly enough in a children's book, they're positively ominous to me. A machine called the Whisperer that can control your thoughts? The Waiting Room, whose indescribable horror is never fully described. And the thought that - in order to be happy - we could ignore the world's problems, let go of hope, and embrace ambivalence. It's enough to make you think.

I thought it was a "stand-alone" but I just found out the sequel came out in May, so I'll be seeking that out in short order. Plus, Susan - whose book judgment I trust implicitly, since she also desperately loves Potter and hearts a good trashy romance - has gone so head over heels for Twilight that I'm going to pick it up, too - nothing like a good teenage girl falls in love with a vampire story to warm your heart.