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SEE JANE READ

Travel the world of imagination this summer: Read these books. With Jane Julius Honchell

As one who has the yen to explore, but who can’t afford a world cruise or passage on the space shuttle, I’ve always been grateful that I can get wherever I want to go simply by opening a book. Whether they are writing about the real world or ones they have created, authors give us the nearly miraculous gift of free tickets to places and times we might otherwise never be able to visit.

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Speaking of mind-travel, if you’re an adventuresome reader, I’m hoping you’ll join me and a bunch of like-minded folks at the third annual Gathering at Keystone College July 16 through 19 because its theme, “There and Back Again: Time, Place and Story,” offers such rich possibilities for creative exploration.

This year’s featured authors and books include Gregory Maguire, author of “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” and Salman Rushdie, author of “Midnight’s Children.” They’ll be joined by poet and author Nancy Willard, whose book of poetry, “In the Salt Marsh,” will also be featured, and Loung Ung, who will talk about “First They Killed My Father,“ her memoir of growing up in Cambodia and her escape from what came to be known as “The Killing Fields.” Also included on the reading list are: “Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe,” by Charles Seife; “Through the Looking Glass,” by Lewis Carroll; “Starry Messenger,” by Peter Sis; and “Four Quartets,” by T.S. Eliot.

Now no one is going to make you stand in the corner if you don’t manage to read all of these books by mid-July, but I offer the titles as an example of the Gathering’s eclectic character. In fact, one of the things I like best about the Gathering is the way each year’s theme brings together not only so many disparate points of view from literature, art, film, science, and music, but also such an interesting and delightful mix of people from all over the country. And there is something for everyone: lectures and panel discussions; hands-on writing workshops and book discussion groups; good food, great conversations, and time to relax and make new friends at a variety of intriguing venues.

While we’re on the subject of connections, I have to confess that before I had read “Wicked” or “Midnight’s Children,” I couldn’t imagine how a book about a character from “The Wizard of Oz” could have anything in common with a novel about India’s independence and subsequent history.

Much as I enjoy fantasy, I hadn’t expected to like “Wicked.” How dare anyone mess with my beloved Oz, I grumbled to myself as I opened the book. But that was before I met Elphaba, who turns out not be merely the cackling, demonic witch who is bent on destroying Dorothy and her friends. In Maguire’s capable hands, Elphaba becomes a very real and complex person whose intent is not to do evil, but good.

Life isn’t easy for Elphaba. For starters, she has to struggle with being different and misunderstood. After all, the poor little girl is born with green skin, and everyone, including her mother, calls her nasty names, like “Little Frog” and “Lizard Girl.” Naturally, all she really wants is what we all want: to be accepted as an equal. Later, during her days at Shiz University, where she meets her roommate, Glinda (Remember the saccharine Good Witch?), Elphaba shows herself to be intelligent and opinionated. Life for the strange green-skinned girl might have turned out to be pretty ordinary, were it not for the world Maguire creates for her.

His Oz is no magic kingdom, but a police state, a dark world where the Animals, who are sentient, speaking beings, are persecuted. Probably because she, too has been oppressed because she is different, Elphaba sides with the Animals and becomes a kind of revolutionary freedom fighter who wants to overthrow the tyrannical Wizard who rules Oz.

One of the best things about this book is that it doesn’t end in a happy, fairy tale sort of way. (After all, Elphaba does become the wicked witch.) But when you finish “Wicked,” you’ll understand why and how her life deteriorates into a sort of madness. And I guarantee you’ll like her a lot more than Dorothy, who shows up at the end of the book as a rather lumpish and dull-witted country girl with an annoying little dog.

While Gregory Maguire creates a believable landscape out of a fantasy world for “Wicked,” Salman Rushdie does just the opposite in “Midnight’s Children,” transforming, through the use of magical realism, a very real world into one where the 1,001 children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, are connected by telepathic powers. Narrated by Saleem Sinai, one of these so-called “midnight’s children” born at the moment of India’s independence from Great Britain, Rushdie’s epic tale traces Saleem’s family history, and through that story, India’s history as well. Saleem’s belief that his own life is inextricably tied to that of his country – that he IS India -- becomes the guiding allegorical principle of “Midnight’s Children.”

One of Rushdie’s many gifts is his ability to share with his readers the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of a world most of us know little or nothing about. If you are able to work your way through this densely convoluted story, you will feel as if you had lived through India’s complex entry into the modern age. Rushdie is also a talented manipulator. Almost nothing in “Midnight’s Children” is as it appears, including Saleem’s true parentage, so expect constant surprises and about-faces. The third pleasure of this book, in my view, is its comic relief. Interspersed among scenes of bloody horror are some laugh-out-loud moments that I came to see as rewards inserted to keep me plugging along through this difficult but brilliant book.

By now, you’ve probably realized that what connects these two very different novels is their authors’ uncanny ability to invent or evoke a sense of time and place and to make us believe the unbelievable in the process. Wow! I can’t wait to see what we’ll make of all this at the Gathering! For more information, and to register for all or portions of the weekend, go to http://www.gathering.keystone.edu. Hope to see you there!

Jane Julius Honchell, who resides in Glenburn Twp., is a well-known features writer and columnist. She is an associate professor at Keystone College, La Plume, where she serves as Director of Theater. "See Jane Read" appears monthly in The Abington Journal.