IN AN age when the latest and greatest Facebook game seems to be the yardstick by which all leisure activities are gauged, it was refreshing to see last week that literature still plays a pivotal role in captivating and entertaining us, irrespective of our age.
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As part of the St Joseph’s Catholic College Book Week celebrations, students and staff abandoned their usual schoolyard attire on Friday to make their favourite characters leap off the page and into a Northern Territory dry season.
The effort put into the execution of some of the costumes was truly staggering and, while judging the winners from each year level proved to be more difficult than I had envisaged, hearing why students had decided to dress up as certain characters reminded me about the timeless quality good books possess.
Despite in many cases being born decades after a book was first published, students brought the characters to life in 2014 because they felt a genuine connection to the story they told.
One student, who could not have been any older than 10 or 11, put his personal spin on Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter, almost 150 years after the character first appeared in print.
When I asked the student why he had opted not to dress up as a character from a modern book, he told me he found them “boring”.
“The Mad Hatter is cool,” the student said excitedly.
“He doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him and has lots of fun.”
The Mad Hatter and countless characters like him have enthralled generations of readers, and are the reason truly incredible books will never be left to collect dust on the shelf.
