In the early nineties, Pizza Hut sponsors Book It!, to promote reading. For every ten books you read, you get a certificate for a free, one-topping pizza. At the end of each month, you come home from Mrs. Sicius’s fifth-grade class and slam down the Book It! certificate in front of your parents like a hunter dropping a deer carcass on the kitchen table. Book that, Family! We are eating tonight!
It turns out that there is no greater pleasure than reading for pizza. No longer do you feel guilty about eschewing the “real” world for these fantasy zones. Now you have an unassailable, American motivation; you’re a breadwinner. Literally. It’s November. Since September, you’ve earned forty dollars’ worth of garlic bread for the family. For days at a stretch, you dissolve into Terry Brooks’s “The Sword of Shannara” series—a sort of Tolkien spinoff, Middle Earth for Cold War kids. There are elves, dwarves, trolls, and Shadowen monsters. You’re only ten, but you’re still pretty sure you ought to feel embarrassed about the unnameable emotions stirred in you by imaginary beings, the elves especially.
You read in the bathroom, in the dry tub, so the light doesn’t wake your sister. Water lisps out of the faucet onto your pajamas. You clock into the Four Lands at 10 P.M., and emerge at dawn with purple night-shift bags under your eyes. You’re sore from flying over Skull Kingdom on the back of a winged Roc, aghast at the carnage in the mountains. Free-men are striking back against the Federation. Across the Blue Divide, the Shadowen are gathering. Armageddon looms.
Tell Mrs. Sicius you have earned another cheese pizza.
(Five years later, in Mr. Crotty’s world-history class, feel déjà vu like a low-grade migraine as you learn about Dresden and Hiroshima. Realize that this blood-soaked past is the soil from which Brooks harvested his epic. It makes the utopian visions of his Druids and halflings seem all the more insane and courageous. The most fantastic thing in a fantasy novel—the rarest—is a period of peace.)
At Pizza Hut, your younger siblings drink fountain soda from red cups, bite into cartoon-yellow mozzarella. Sit back with your arms folded. “Get a refill, Dad!” you encourage, like some magnanimous king. Everything is going aces until the waitress, who, like a raccoon, combines indifference and nosiness, flips through the Book It! certificate.
1. “The Sword of Shannara”
2. “The Wishsong of Shannara”
3. “The Elfstones of Shannara”
Your dad laughs and makes a joke about “the gallstones of Shannara.”
“Last month, she read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ “ your mom says, then hustles you toward the car.
So it’s at the U.S. 1 Pizza Hut, in Kendall, Florida, under the neon-pink sconces, that you first encounter the adults’ distinction between “literature” and “genre.”
In the car, your mom asks to see one of the Shannara books. A young man, who looks like Jodie Foster dressed as Robin Hood, is holding a big glowing rock. That’s Wil Ohmsford, Scion of Shannara, you explain. He and Amberle have to rekindle the seed of the Ellcrys, a tree that produces this sort of ozone layer of magic. It’s deteriorating faster than the elves can say “chlorofluorocarbons—”
Your mom seems to have stopped listening.
“Are these for school?” she asks hopefully.
Last month, you humped around a water-stained copy of “Pride and Prejudice” and nobody said boo to you. In that book, some British sisters vie to get their dance cards punched. In the Shannara books, a nuclear holocaust has wiped out almost every living thing. And “now”—two thousand years in the future—the Ohmsford siblings have rediscovered a burning green magic, germinating under the world, the past waiting to be reborn as future.
“The Elfstones” is so much better than “Pride and Prejudice.” Yet it has been made clear to you that the Austen book is a classic, while Terry Brooks is “a hack.” For school, you’ve read “Where the Red Fern Grows” and “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” books that start with prepositions and end in cornfields. They, too, are classics, and your class gets frog-marched through them single file, on a path worn smooth by a million schoolkids’ sneakers before you. English class sometimes reminds you of your field trips to Florida’s Historic Sites. “Look at that lovely imagery!” Mrs. Sicius commands, mapping a sentence about dogs on the blackboard. Every step of the way through these books is chaperoned. At the end, you write a report.
So give up on the honor system. (Thanks, Pizza Hut!) Start filling in the Book It! certificate with all manner of sanctioned bullshit: “Little Women,” “Little Men,” “Stuart Little.” In the dead of night, keep reading Terry Brooks until you’re out of books.
Years later, watch a new generation of children beam stories about wizards and eloquent unicorns directly onto their Kindles. They sit on the bus blabbing openly to one another about hippogriffs, pixies. Watch them walking down the sidewalk with their Quidditch brooms knocking and their shadows in the open, their spell books downloaded onto flat gray brains, these magic lovers, these children of the future. ♦