DNF: The Wind in the Willows
In a forest, four friends live out their lives contentesly; amiable Rat, reserved Mole, boisterous Badger and the outrageous Toad. The plot concerns Toad and his fixation on the new invention of motor cars, but there are some detours along the way.
I've never read this book before. I was helping my parents move and my siblings and I were offered any number of books to choose from. Most were worthless trash, of the sort of Christian nationalist rhetoric that's been a plague on our country these past six decades, but a few were various other books, fiction for children. I knew this book by name if not by plot, so I opted to take it for myself and give it a read (among other books, but that'll one up later).
I was, perhaps, set up to fail from the get-go. I thought the Toad mentioned in this book was the Toad from Frog and Toad, and I dearly love the musical. Finding out this was a different Toad entirely was a disappointment I endeavoured to overcome. I was for a time enchanted by the book and its illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard, and the charming little world presented by Grahame.
Alas, like the forest within, this book has an uglier side to it. It's very much a product of its time, featuring blunt and ready use of violence, classist ideas about propriety, and a lack of understanding for how dangerous cars can be, although this last point may be directed to the fact the book was written in 1908. There's a heavy focus on wholesomeness which is undercut by the understanding the author has about the world, and the rigid structures therein. Some of the actions the characters take (even when they're portrayed as good guys) are unnerving to modern audiences, and distasteful to me.
It's also just not really good at world building. The animals all have houses in the forest and some wear clothes, but there are also humans, and the humans keep some animals as pets, and sometimes the animals keep other animals as pets... When you get right down to it, the world building feels like this society has an unfortunate slavery problem.
All of this could be bearable, manageable at least, if the book were entertaining. Unfortunate, problematic or outdated fiction has its place in the modern day, and the book is a historically-significant icon that's important to maintain. But the worst sin this book commits is that it's boring. I have no attachment to the characters, and the prose is not terribly good, pointing at important themes where it doesn't say the themes outright. I struggled to read this one, even two short pages making me groan and look away. It's like a bog in the forest: the view is nice, but you're always getting stuck, and something smells awful.
There are gleams of something interesting just trying to get out here. Pan shows up at one point, and the book becomes something magical. Mole finding his home again is a warm, inviting passage, full of empathy and pathos. But it's not enough to keep me trudging through the bog.
I find more interest in the physical book itself, whose picture I have shown is a copy of the one I have. The book in my hands is old. This is not unusual; I have read and held old books before. The book was published six years before ISBN numbers were invented, so tracking down information about it is hard, but I'm able to with some other clues. It was much harder to track down an unofficial copy of A Study in Scarlet, which turned out to be over 120 years old, and I have a copy of The Arabian Nights from 1914, two books that are both older and have some associated mysteries.
The thing that gets me is the sheer living this book went through. It was owned and then donated to a Christian school, who had to apply a barcode for their internal system. They got it wrong, too; the printed internal number is 1873, but multiple handwritten notes and the barcode confirm 1895. (I had thought these were dates at first which confused me). There is a library records card that shows who checked out the book and when, the last dates including years for '98; if you follow the math back, kids started reading this in '92. Several kids borrowed it again immediately after they returned it, the first, Karen E, borrowing it three times. It's covered in cuts and bruises, exuberant children leaving stains, tearing pages, breaking the spine and drawing along the edges, but someone has gone and taped and coerced the book into as good a shape as it can, and even still some pages are falling out. It's also got a Gaylord book jacket.
So many memories; so much history, even from less than thirty years back. This book was much-loved; I wanted to enjoy it as much as they did, for such love and devotion touches me even now. And a part of me will remain sad that I cannot match that affection, but for my own sake I won't read it to the end. Like the book itself, the story within had gotten scraped and jabbed and ripped, and despite repair attempts it's not the same thing it was when it started. I cannot see the thing that made it special, and for that reason it goes back on the shelf.