MMM – Please Welcome Jen, Devourer of Books!

• Posted on 13th June 2011
• in Blog, Margaret Mitchell Month
• by Erin Blakemore

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I feel a wind blowing in some fabulous guest posts…and prizes! [Contest entries are now closed, but your comments are still welcome!  Please see this week's posts for your chance to comment and win more GWTW swag.] And now, meet our first guest, Jen, who overcame a fear of chunksters to learn to love the Wind.

Gone With the Chunksters

I’m finally starting to pick up chunksters again; I suppose I have Erin Blakemore to thank for that. Admitting my relatively new ‘fear’ of chunksters during the Heroine Love extravaganza, along with my redeeming adoration of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, has helped me actually consider them as a viable reading option once again. I still don’t pick them up all the time, but they are slowly making their way back into my reading rotation.

 

But really, who cares? I mean, was I really missing anything by not reading extremely long novels in the first place?

In the grand scheme of things, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. But the entire time I avoided chunksters, part of me missed them. I missed spending a week or more on one book, immersed in the place and time, living life with the characters. This feeling of something missing did not spring from my brain full-fledged, however, it grew from memorable experiences with long and wonderful books, beginning with Gone With the Wind.

I still remember the circumstances surrounding my first read of Gone With the Wind. Seventh grade, Christmas vacation. My English class had a contest each quarter to see who could read the most pages, and I was always vying for first place with a few other avid readers. I decided that over break I would read a Very. Long. Book. in order to pull ahead. What exactly led me to choosing Gone With the Wind in particular I’m not positive, but the experience was completely – pardon my pun – novel. The edition I borrowed from the library was well over 1,000 pages, maybe 1,100 and was perhaps three times longer than anything else I had ever read.

I lived with that book for nearly two weeks. I remember carting it around the house, reading in bed, attempting to balance it in the bath without dropping it in (not an easy feat with a book of that size). For the entirety of Christmas vacation I devoured Gone With the Wind. It was my first time diving into such a long, rich, detailed novel, and I savored every minute of it, not least the feeling of immense accomplishment that came from making my way through over 1,000 pages of love, war, and redemption.

Perhaps the thing that has stuck with me the most is how Mitchell opened my eyes to the reality of how different history can look to different people with her story of war, slavery, and reconstruction. She may have been an apologist for the South, but the idea that not everyone will take the same view of history was new to me, and without her taking on the Southern viewpoint, I would not have grasped that concept when I did. It may even be that Mitchell and this eye-opening experience deserve the credit for my ongoing love of history.

I may have Diana Gabaldon and Erin Blakemore to thank for reminding me that my life is richer with epic novels, but I owe a debt of gratitude to Margaret Mitchell for teaching me that lesson in the first place.

Maybe it is time for a reread.

Jen has been blogging at Devourer of Books for three years, but as been a ravenous reader for as long as she can remember. If she isn’t at work or reading and playing with her toddler, she is probably reading or scheming up yet another blog project to fill up all that extra time she doesn’t have. Jen is also the proprietor of Booklicity, a company dedicated to providing targeted blog publicity for books and authors.

Tags: chunksters, devourer of books, gone with the wind, guest blog, margaret mitchell, margaret mitchell month