I should not have enjoyed Shane Jones’s novel Light Boxes.

Usually I just don’t like fiction that exists on a magical plain.  That’s not a criticism of the fundamental nature of such work.  It just doesn’t do it for me.  For whatever reason, I prefer my fiction to be grounded in the laws of physics.

I’ve paid a social price for this attitude of mine.  People assume I’m a snob for not being able to tolerate all of those Harry Potter things.  They secretly theorize that I shun The Lord of the Rings because my ears are, shall we say, Hobbit-like.  I don’t dig on García Márquez either (shocking!).  Or Rushdie.  I tried.  Can’t do it.  Maybe I’ll try again some day when I’ve finished reading everything else.  Maybe not.

I once had a potential love interest stop speaking to me mid-meal (as in, not speaking one single additional word) after I stated that I don’t like fantasy.  Awkward, but ultimately most fortunate.

Soon after passing by its beautifully designed cover, it becomes quite clear that Light Boxes takes place in a world created by Shane Jones.  It’s a cold, dreary place where the month of February lasts forever, where dead children live in tunnels under the ground and where February is also a person, or a person-like being, who is responsible for inflicting this seemingly eternal winter on a town of people strangely obsessed with flying hot air balloons.

My gut did initially react negatively, but I kept reading anyway.  Why?  Certainly Jones’s deceptively simple and highly effective prose was a large part of the reason.  But if this book had been 300 or 400 or 1,000 pages, I might simply have moved on to another book in the stack.  Light Boxes is 168 pages long, and they’re small pages.  It’s rare for any one of its sections to last for more than two pages, and most are much shorter than that.  Each section is tightly written and could probably stand all on its own (even if the meaning might not be entirely clear if it were taken out of context).  I have no idea whether Jones structured his novel this way intentionally, but the fact is that this book is ideally suited for reading quickly and for reading until the end.

That’s not why I liked this book.  It’s why I kept reading it.  Those very manageable short sections allowed me to get to the point where I could get past my hang-ups and really enjoy passages like this:

They held hands.  They formed dozens of circles around their deflated smoldering balloons.  Balloons silken globes the colors magenta grass green and sky blue were mud strewn wet with holy water and burned black through the stitching.

Bianca said, I don’t understand.

Thaddeus said, I don’t either.

Is this February’s doing, she said.

Maybe, said Thaddeus who looked up at the sky.

A scroll of parchment was nailed to an oak tree, calling for the end of all things that could fly…

I don’t want to make too much of our famously shortened attention spans or how the internet has made us all want to read “modules” instead of lengthy stretches of text.  There may be something to all that, but that’s not my point here.

The fact is simply that it’s hard enough to get a person to read a book, particularly a book on the more literary end of the spectrum.  If a writer has the discipline necessary to write in this way, and if such a structure suits the work, then I think it does greatly increase the book’s chances of being read.  Of course, of course, of course, it still has to be good.  But there are many good books that are rarely read.

No, I don’t think every novel now needs to be short or that literature must be comprised of bite-sized chunks.  I would not want that.  I’m quite content reading long chapters and books.

Light Boxes, I suspect, would also be ideally suited to reading in an electronic format.  Just sayin’.

By the time I arrived at page 168, if there had been more, I would have kept reading.  What can I say?  Might just have to read it again.

Light Boxes is available directly from Publishing Genius Press and at a good bookstore near you.

For a normal review of Light Boxes, try this one or this one or this one (includes a good interview with Shane Jones).

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