An enthralling book, I reckon, is a function of two things: the book’s virtues itself and one’s opportunity to be enthralled. Back in my high school days, I had enough time on my hands that I could throw myself into a big fat novel and plow my way through it in three or four days (particularly in the summer). I took on most of the best selling potboilers by Irving Wallace, Leon Uris, and James Michener and considered myself reasonably engaged.
But for true enthrallment, I have to point to that icon of adolescent true-believerhood, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. So help me, I read through my Signet mass paperback edition twice, underlining passages, and taxing the binding to the point that I had to rubberband my copy to keep its pages together. I may have been 16 at the time.
Is Atlas Shrugged a great book? Not as I see things now. But Ayn Rand had the knack of writing with a total conviction that appealed to teenagers seeking a grand belief system. She was also influenced by (and a defender of) novelists in the vein of Alexander Dumas, and some of this rubbed off on her novels. Engrossing reads, especially for the young.
But my favorite enthralling book is Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. I came to Dickens late in life. I had to read Great Expectations and Oliver Twist in high school English classes, but I’d not been won over by either book. Decades later, I came upon a facsimile edition of Dickens’ original Nicholas Nickleby’s monthly chapter editions, illustrations included, and took a chance. Once I began reading, I was totally sucked in.
As I later learned, this was from Dickens’ early prime period, prior to the death of his wife’s sister, on whom he had a secret crush. After her very premature death, Dickens settled into a quasi-tragic mode in his books. But Nicholas Nickleby preceded that. Not that NN isn’t full of tragedy and misery, but it is so over-the-top and the descriptions so droll that I found myself laughing out loud at the oddest junctures.
My enjoyment was enhanced by Phiz’s illustrations which capture and drive home the book’s overall farcical tone, and by the reproduction of all the ads that ran in the original periodical monthly chapters. (Aromatic Spirits of Vinegar! Labern’s Botanic Cream! Eight Day Clocks!) It’s a pity that this edition, originally published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1982, is now out of print; it’s the next best thing to time travel. As is Nicholas Nickleby, no matter what edition you pick up. If you’ve never read it, I encourage you to give it a go. You’re in for a grand time.
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