Being a reader, I have unsurprisingly taken a number of fundamental beliefs from the fiction I’ve read. Most of them were things encountered during my early teen years; a few, read later, clarified or distilled things I believed anyway, and hell, some of them are brand-new. I’ve been meaning to write them down for a while now. They’re things like:
Sex is good. (Heinlein, ElfQuest, Judy Blume)
Cajun food is delicious. (X-Men*)
Americans are really, really screwed up about sex and violence. (ElfQuest)
Women are not only smart, capable and sexy, but clever enough to get men to do the heavy lifting. (Heinlein)
Van Gogh is awesome. (Doctor Who**)
Time is not as we perceive it. (Richard Bach, Doctor Who, Kim Stanley Robinson)
Poetry is worth it. (Beauty and the Beast)
There are probably more, but in specific, this is the one that prompts me to get my shit together and make this post today, after meaning to do so for months:
Killing is wrong. (Trent the Uncatchable)
* Yes, as far as I can tell, I developed a love for Cajun food because of Gambit.
** Look, if a comic book can make me love Cajun food, I see no reason why a TV show shouldn’t make me love an artist.
You know what a brilliant thing to notice. I expect that all of us who started reading as young people have a list like this…similar but with our specifics. I may do a post like this too…what a fun thing to think about. One of the reasons I encourage kids and teens to read is because I found the world, both physical and intellectual, in books. I discovered what could happen in certain situations, I found out how you could handle situations that I had never faced, I saw a different world from a different point of view…as a result my world got bigger.