Hello, your Fairy God-Librarian here, and this post is going to make you question your own thoughts. Are they really your own or have you actually been listening to voices this whole time?
Now, when I say voices, I don’t mean the kind that plague people who suffer from certain types of mental disorders.
Actually, I do.
It’s called Love-of-Reading Syndrome, LORS, and it normally affects children. Fortunately, the disorder has no cure and is life-long. It typically attacks the mind and heart, causes enhanced vocabulary and writing skills, keeps its victims up way passed their bedtimes, increases imagination, dispels boredom, and yes, forces the victim to hear the voices of the author’s words in their heads.
To my delight, I contracted this disease around the age of six. My parents had bought me the Hooked on Phonics books and read to me almost every night after Kindergarten. Mistake number one. Then, I was enrolled into a first grade class that coincidentally was taught by one of the carriers of the disease; her contagion was transmitted to me soon after the first few weeks of school. Mistake number two.
The final draw lies with my father. He put the words in my head that made me refuse to see a doctor: “If you can read, you can write, and if you can do both of those things, you can do anything.” There was no hope for me after that.
Not long after I consigned myself to my fate, I found others like me. Others who had let their disease control them, make them flip the symptoms back on its head. These people were called writers.
Their courage inspired me. If they could live with their mental disorder, then so could I! I now write my own stories, while I read these book things voraciously. I found the authors who spoke to me the most. These are the voices that are constantly talking to me in my head.
They, and their chosen genre, are:
- J. K. Rowling (middle-grade fantasy and mystery)
- Brandon Sanderson (epic fantasy)
- Sarah Addison Allen (magical realism)
- Juliet Marillier (Celtic fantasy)
- Karen Kingsbury (Christian Lit)
- Scott Westerfeld (fantasy)
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (magical realism)
- Frank Peretti (Christian fantasy)
- Ted Dekker (Christian fantasy)
- Charles Dickens (Literature)
- Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Bronte (Literature)
- J. R. R. Tolkien (Christian epic fantasy)
- Jane Austen (romance Literature)
- Arthur Conan Doyle (mystery)
- C. S. Lewis (Christian epic fantasy)
These were the main culprits, though not the only ones. I also blame
- Lord Byron
- Emily Dickinson
- John Donne
- W. H. Auden
- Robert Frost
- e. e. cummings
- Francis Petrarch
- Edgar Allen Poe
- Beatrix Potter
- Walt Whitman
and many more for my love of poetry.
- William Shakespeare
- Arthur Miller
- Tennessee Williams
- Oscar Wilde
- Henrik Ibsen
- Sophocles
are the perpetrators of my fascination with theater. How dare these people create stories and ideas that infiltrate my young mind and make me fall in love with reading and writing books!
Now, art. That’s another symptom of LORS. I give blame to
- Leonid Afremov
- Pierre Renoir
- Edouard Manet
- Edgar Degas
- Georgia O’Keeffe
- Claude Monet
- Tim Gagnon
- Brandon McConnell
for instilling in me the wonderment of the visual arts, alongside the written arts.
So, there you have it. Mid-twenties and the LORS disease is still in full swing. I adore the voices and pictures in my head.
It’s a disease that will remain with me till I die. And you know what?
I’m okay with that.
Love,
Lacie 🙂