love, read, write

Today’s ‘essay’ is based on the article “Bookscapes” by Victoria Johnson, in the literary magazine “Muse” in the May/June 2012 Issue.

(I’d just like to give full credit so I don’t get sued. 3: )

I love books. Books are awesome and they sweep you off your feet and they take you to a new place, a place that everyone is welcome to and everyone can help develop and create. It gives me a break from stressful things and it can sometimes make me feel better. And reading this article just gave me another reassuring feeling that I am not the only person in the world who feels this. And that some people choose to take their love for books even further.

Johnson, in this article, takes the subject of ‘Books with maps.’ Basically, books with long journeys or books that take place in the same general area, places where a map can help guide you step through the new world it makes. She explains the differences of the purposes of the maps. For example, while the Phantom Tollbooth (by Norton Juster) map generates as a usual map would, the Winnie-the-Pooh (by A. A. Milne) map is more of an easy-fied map that doesn’t exactly prove useful in navigating through the story, but more of an along-side picture that is characterized to have been “Drawn by me and Mr Shepard helpd".

It is truly intriguing and very thought provoking that someone would take these maps, which were taken by me, for granted, and dissect them into categories and specify why this type of map would help in this type of story and plot.

One ‘famous’ book (series) with a map that Johnson forgot, or more likely, left out because of the length of the article, was the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis. I have read the whole series a while back, and I still remember looking at the map in awe of the detail and how the story came alive just because of the map. I think that the Narnia map falls into the ‘Phantom Tollbooth’ category—it serves as a normal map would.

At this, one must ask oneself a question. Do maps really do good to the reader? I have mixed feelings about this, and it seems I am situated on the border line between two options. To the author writing the story, it will do the reader good. Because it portrays the story and setting and relative location in a more accurate way than it would have without a map. It would make the story’s image in the author’s mind more similar to the story’s image in the reader’s mind. It would also bring the story alive and bring you closer to the story. But to the reader, I find that maps can be a little restraining. Maps create boundaries in the ‘imagination’ part of reading. After all, part of reading books is imagining the characters for yourself. We often find ourselves saying, “That’s not how he looked like in my head!” when seeing a movie based on a novel. Making a map sort of ruins that, and it kind of takes away the role of our brain working to put and fit together the pieces of the puzzle described in the story to create a whole, single, coherent map. The answer’s already there, on the first page.

With maps or without, Juster, Milne, Tolkien, and many other fantastic, well known, celebrated authors with maps as accompaniment to their stories have creative and imaginative stories that wouldn’t, and couldn’t be hindered by any sort of ‘restraint’ to imagination. Although maps themselves may be unhelpful, the story is what matters, and in the end, all that counts.