In the past few weeks, I've gone down the DeMatteis rabbit hole (see last post). I've been reading a number of his graphic novels, which include:
- Brooklyn Dreams, his autobiography of growing up in Brooklyn
- Some of his children's works: Abadazad books 1 and 2, and The Stardust Kid (which was excellent)
- Re-reading Moonshadow (I found a used copy on ebay for only $15! This was a minor miracle, considering it's out of print, and most copies on ebay and Amazon go for $90-$100!)
-
Doctor Strange: Into Shamballa
- Reading several of his recent interviews
One of the surprising things I learned from all of this is his love for the works of author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This is mentioned once or twice in Brooklyn Dreams, a couple of times in Moonshadow, and once in a recent interview. This struck me as unusual; you don't normally hear Russian writers mentioned as someone's favorite author.
Strangely, this brought to mind another event from the 9th grade, just like in my last post. And it even involves the same teacher. This time, though, it wasn't from English class, but instead from when I was on the academic team (aka quiz bowl; basically it was a team-based trivia competition).
One day, after school, I was at an academic team practice. We were divided into two teams, and the teacher was asking us questions, just like in a real competition. There was one question that stuck out. I think it went something like this:
What Russian author created the characters Dmitri, Ivan, and Aleksey Fyodorovich in his novel The Brothers Karamazov?This sparked an immediate outburst from both teams: laughter at the absurd-sounding names, and scoffs at the ridiculous difficulty of the question. How could anyone possibly know the answer?
The outburst was interrupted when I calmly and boldly buzzed in. Suddenly everyone got silent. The teacher, looking at me with wide, surprised eyes, called my name (rules stipulated you had to wait until your name was called).
"Fyodor Dostoyevsky," I answered.
Incredulous, the teacher replied: "That is right!"
What followed was chaos. There were gasps of astonishment as jaws hit the floor. The laughter and scoffs from a few seconds prior turned to shock and amazement. I wouldn't be surprised if someone fell out of their chair.
When the teacher restored order, she asked "How on earth did you know that?"
I answered honestly: "That's one of the clues in the video game Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?"
"Well, it pays to play video games!" said the teacher.
Carmen Sandiego was a series of educational video games that were popular at the time. You had to follow clues to catch Carmen and prevent her from stealing treasure. There were other versions like Where in the USA... and Where in the World... but Where in Time... was the only one I played. The game came with a desk encyclopedia to use when researching clues! I distinctly remember looking up Dostoyevsky's entry and reading about The Brothers Karamazov to solve part of the game.
With all of the above in mind, last week I started giving serious thought to actually reading a Dostoyevsky book. Then I wondered: with all of the company book sales Wendy and I have gone to over the years, was there any chance we'd picked up anything written by him? So I went to librarything.com, which is a website I use to catalog all of our books, and ran a search. It turns out in 2010 we bought a copy of The Brothers Karamazov at one of those company book sales! After a bit of hunting, I found the book, on the shelves right behind my computer desk.
I was surprised to see it's a huge book! Here it is next to the Arthur C. Clarke mega-book I recently read:
As I learned from reading the Clarke book, there's no time like the present. So now I've begun reading yet another 1,000 page tome, this time by a Russian author, and it's all thanks to comic books and video games.