Toads-in-the-Hole

Each year, I return to a hodgepodge of fiction favorites. These tried-and-true pet tomes are decidedly based on the turning of the seasons. For me, it is a clash not unlike atonal singing to pick up a copy of Anna Karenina during summer’s heat, or choose to sail away with Captain Blood while snow is falling and whirling outside the window. Some out there in Toadsland would probably say just the opposite, and that fiction at its purest is escapist, and so there is no better time to be marooned on hot, turbid Tortuga with the Captain than while the real world is frigid and cold. But, we all have our preferences, and for me there is a time for everything under heaven, or more specifically, autumn is a perfect season to read Ray Bradbury and Connie Willis.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

In the Fall of 1994, I was a sophomore in high school and worked away my afternoons and evenings arranging the stacks at our local B. Dalton Bookseller. Occasionally, the company mandated we booksellers to wean the shelves of their excess and strip books – or ruthlessly tear the front cover of a paperback from its binding and in an instant render the text unsellable. One afternoon, I sat in the back, pulling covers from ancient romances and decrepit science fiction, when a flash of pink and gray caught my eye: Something Wicked This Way Comes. Part of the joy of being an adolescent, being employed at a bookstore, and being assigned to strip, is the sitting around and casually perusing your way through imagined sandy beaches, windswept towers, foreboding nineteenth-century back alleys, or haunted black caves in the hours of the late afternoon. On that particular day, I never left Green Town, Illinois. Each and every autumn since I pull out my treasured, stripped copy of Bradbury’s nostalgic, coming-of-age nightmare and relive that moment of my own young life all over again.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

I cannot exactly remember when my friend Kris loaned me her treasured copy of Doomsday Book. But, she promised, “If I know you, I know you’ll love this book.” I remember consuming the entire medieval time travel tale one rainy October afternoon, being as swept away by the story as the novel’s heroine is swept away by kirtles, tolling bells, fleas, and buboes. Ah, the Black Death … A topic quite near and dear to my heart (and the theme of my undergraduate thesis: Shakespeare and The Plague). Kris was right about me loving Willis’s sci-fi fantasy, and just yesterday – when I discovered to my horror that our local library does not carry Doomsday Book (and the nearest library that has a copy is in Spearfish) – I purchased an almost-new, used copy from our village bookseller. Some afternoon in the near future, I’ll eagerly crack the binding and find myself in 14th century England all over again.