"Makdom and Fairnesse"

Maybe it's because I'm still in the honeymoon period, and I will shortly metamorphose into the expected image of the graduate student, deeply dissatisfied with academic life, but right now, despite the fifty pages of academic writing that I have to complete over the next fifteen days, I don't feel distressed. I'm frustrated that I'll spend my favorite time of the year writing papers instead of window-shopping on Fifth Avenue and ice-skating in Central Park, and I'm not looking forward to the long days spent in libraries, the late nights spent with eyes glued to the computer screen. But whenever I turn my gaze to the big picture, I can't help but grin a little bit. Being a grad student is hard -- but it's something I care about, deeply, something in which I'm still incredibly invested, and right now this makes all the difference.

Fifteen to twenty of those fifty pages will be spent writing about George Eliot's Middlemarch, which I finally finished reading earlier this semester, and which is one of the most intricate, thoughtful, complex, and beautiful novels I've ever read. It's not light reading, but it's been incredibly worth it for me, and I suspect part of this is because of the way some of its characters attempt to define work: not just as a job, not just something that pays the bills, but as a vocation, a calling, something you are instead of just something you do. Early in the novel, Eliot describes in detail the moment when one character, Lydgate, decides to become a doctor. On a rainy day, he wanders into the library, pulls an encyclopedia off of the shelf, and opens it to a random page to begin reading:

The page he opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame. [...] the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces blanked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "makdom and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires?

Or to put Eliot's question another way: why is it that no one writes novels about how men and women come to fall in love with their jobs?

When my professor asked this question to the class of mixed undergrads and grad students, there was a kind of silence, punctuated by a few suppressed giggles and blank stares. How could you fall in love with your job? That's not what jobs are about. They're things you do because you need to pay bills and put food on the table, and even if they start out in love with your job that's not a sustainable attitude, sooner or later the system will grind it out of you, and then you'll come home after work and on weekends and do your best to forget your job ever happened.

It's a response that I've gotten before after guiltily admitting that I really do love my work. I think it's an understandable response in our cultural context. But it's one that I hope I'll never come to share.

I'll still complain, I'll still be upset and frustrated, and there will still be days when I just don't want to do all the work that needs to be done -- but I will never think it isn't somehow worth it. The study of literature and all that it entails is my vocation: for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer (let's be honest, it's for poorer), in sickness and in health.

Yes, I have fifty pages to write in the next fifteen days. But I also get paid to read books and talk about them with other interesting and interested people, and I can't imagine any career more worth wooing.

What Makes a Good Novel

When I started work as an intern for the Office of Letters and Light back in September 2007, one of the first perks of the job (after the burrito lunches and scintillating office conversation) came in the form of a free copy of Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem!. It had suffered the slings and arrows of "RETURN TO SENDER" and come back a little worse for the wear, but I'm one of those people who prefers the term "previously loved" to "previously owned," at least when it comes to books, and that scuffed-up cover did nothing to prevent me from diving right into it as soon as I got on the bus back to Berkeley.

The book serves as a kind of manual or advice handbook for participating in National Novel Writing Month (a challenge I've explained elsewhere), and a lot of the writing exercises and strategies are particularly relevant to those trying to eke time out of their "real life" in which to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November, but some of them stood out to me then -- and still stand out to me now -- as getting at something fundamental about all writing, and the kinds of desires that ought to motivate it.

I've forgotten more of the book than I'd like to admit, but four years (and four novel-filled Novembers) later, one of the exercises strikes me as particularly important. It's the one Chris calls "the Magna Carta." The idea is simple. Take a piece of paper. Now write at the top, in big and important letters, "WHAT MAKES A GOOD NOVEL." Now make a list. Make it your list, not anyone else's. Think about the kinds of novels you love to read, and be honest with yourself about what they're like and what you like about them. Finally, take your finished list and put it somewhere you can see it. When things get tough, when the writing isn't "working," look back at that list and use it as a way to diagnose your novel's problems, because if you don't like your novel, how much does it matter if anyone else does?

Of course these lists can change. In getting ready to write this year's novel, I stumbled across the Magna Carta list that I wrote four years ago, and for the first time thought, "That's not what my list looks like anymore." So I started working on a new one.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD NOVEL

- characters and relationships that question traditional gender roles and/or established social hierarchies; bonds and affinities that cross boundaries of gender, class, or simply expectation without perpetuating inequalities

- girls and women who possess noteworthy mental, physical, and/or emotional strength, which they use to advance the course of the story

- clever integration of the supernatural, unnatural, magical, and/or unexpected to highlight and complicate, rather than to dismiss or solve, the conflicts of the characters and (more generally) the problems of modern existence

- a spunky and spirited character who will not take no for an answer, who is a go-getter and an optimist and may not always succeed but keeps on trying (not necessarily protagonist)

- deliberation regarding setting, both time and place; a sense that these places are loved by and important to the story as a whole in addition to specific characters within the story

- children who have honest, mature, complex, and ultimately positive relationships with their parents

- parents and/or mentors who support children in tackling the big things life throws at them (everything from love to warfare) while ultimately letting them make their own decisions, and providing them with the sense that those decisions matter

- complex antagonist(s), who operate in tandem with internal conflicts to hassle the protagonist(s)

- realistic dialogue that is always emotionally charged but only rarely straightforward; dialogue-as-conflict, dialogue-as-occasional-misunderstanding, but never dialogue-as-utterly-impossible

- ultimate affirmation of the transcendent power of love, language, literature, creativity, and/or cooperation; faith in the possibility of intersubjective exchange, however mediated it may be

It's obviously not exhaustive, and I'm sure that it'll keep growing and changing as I keep growing and changing, but it's a good place to start. And if you wrote up a "Magna Carta" of your own, I'd love to know what might make its way onto your list!

The Pen and the Telescope: Words as a Source of Power in So You Want to Be a Wizard

Warning: The following post contains significant spoilers for the plot of So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane. If you haven't read the novel, and you have any intention of doing so, save this post for later! I've tried to write this post in a way so as to make it accessible to people who haven't even heard of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series before, so if you haven't read it you shouldn't be confused -- and if you are, please let me know in a comment so that I can make myself clearer!

“Part of the problem, Nita thought to herself as she tore desperately down Rose Avenue, is that I can’t keep my mouth shut.” (11)

So begins Diane Duane’s first young adult fantasy novel, So You Want to Be a Wizard. From the genre and the title, the first-time reader might expect thirteen-year-old Nita to be fleeing some fierce mythological creature or an evil sorcerer, but the truth is at once more mundane and more threatening: she lives firmly in our world, and she’s running from a group of schoolyard bullies.

Bookish and intelligent at an age when such qualities will get Nita shunned at best and beaten up at worst, her brain is all she has going for, but when taunted by Joanne and her gang, even her quick tongue won’t save her, and her cunning retorts are more likely to get her in trouble than save her skin. Like everyone else who was ever labeled a geek, nerd, or bookworm as a kid (myself included), Nita seems vitally aware of the supreme unfairness of her situation. She’s smart, so she talks; she talks, so she gets in trouble. There’s always the possibility that she could be just like the other kids if only she could just stay quiet—but she can’t, not while maintaining her own integrity and sense of self.

Luckily, Nita manages to hide from the bullies in “a little brown-brick building with windows warmly alight—refuge, safety, sanctuary. The library” (12). The knowing librarian suggests that Nita hide in the children’s section and promises to misdirect the bullies who come in after her. So it’s in the basement of her local library that Nita first discovers the book that’s about to change her life: an innocuous-looking book called So You Want to Be a Wizard. At first she’s sure it’s someone’s idea of a joke—there can’t really be wizards, and even if there were, they certainly wouldn’t have instruction manuals—but she begins to read it all the same, until “it abruptly stopped being a game, with one paragraph”:

Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first. But their love for and fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned with. Their ability to convince a piece of the world—a tree, say, or a stone—that it’s not what it thinks it is, that it’s something else, is the very heart of wizardry. Words skillfully used, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind, are the wizard’s most basic tools. With them a wizard can stop a tidal wave, talk a tree out of growing or into it—freeze fire, burn rain—even slow down the death of the Universe. (15-16)

So You Want to Be a Wizard announces itself to a child who is both at risk and at promise because of her strong relationship to books and her appreciation for words. It appears in the moment when Nita is both at her most vulnerable and her most protected, on the run from disaster and yet surrounded by the books that have been her friends and companions when people can’t be counted on. Tellingly, the fantasy it presents her with is linguistic: become a wizard, the book says, and your words will have power. Forget those bullies—when you talk, the whole universe will listen.

Unfortunately, the bullies don’t make themselves easy to forget. The library provides only temporary solace, and as soon as Nita leaves (with her copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard in tow), she’s ambushed by Joanne and her gang. They beat her up and steal one of her most prized possessions, her space pen “that could write on butter or glass or upside down” (19). The space pen, with its pressurized ink cartridge that allows it to write on almost anything, seems the perfect representation of Nita’s desire to express herself without restrictions, and it is exactly this kind of freedom that Joanne denies her. Words are the only tools Nita has for fighting back, and Joanne both literally and metaphorically robs her of them.

The bullies might have stolen her pen, but her library book is still intact, and Nita reads on, learning of “the Speech, the magical tongue in which objects and living creatures can be described in more accuracy than any human language” (16), in which names are “‘a way of saying what you are’” (34) with the same devastating precision. Wizardry, for Nita, becomes a way of reclaiming linguistic agency and using it to fight back, not just against Joanne’s physical bullying, but against Joanne’s attempt to redefine Nita’s geekiness from a hostile perspective. Despite children’s rhymes to the contrary, Nita knows that words can hurt just as well as sticks and stones:

(Bookworm,) she heard the old jeering voices go in her head, (foureyes, smartass, hide-in-the-house-and-read. Walking encyclopedia. Think you’re so hot.) “No,” she remembered herself answering once, “I just like to find things out!” And she sighed, feeling rueful. That time she had found out about being punched in the stomach. (13)

Her experience suggests that there is no separating harsh words from harsh actions, and that it’s not only in the Speech that names have a frightening ability to define who you are. When Nita resists the bullies, she is resisting a kind of malevolent renaming. It’s no surprise that when Nita first meets Kit, a fellow young wizard with whom she shares a history of being bullied, the first thing they have in common is a dislike of what other people call them:

“I’m Kit,” he said then. “Christopher, really, but I hate Christopher.”

“Nita,” she said. “It’s short for Juanita. I hate that too.” (30)

Like Nita, Kit’s linguistic expression is threatened—he’s teased and bullied partly because he’s skipped a grade, but partly because of his Hispanic accent—and when she tells him about Joanne stealing her pen, it doesn’t take long for him to agree to help Nita get it back. The first spell they work together is one that makes use of their growing fluency in the Speech to stop the bullying and the redefinition that comes along with it. Kit hopes to attract an aura to himself that will keep the other boys from trying to beat him up; Nita just wants to regain her pen.

It turns out that wizardry is not quite so simple. Their initial spell backfires, and Nita and Kit find themselves unintentionally babysitting a white hole dubbed “Fred,” who has come to Earth to warn the local wizarding advisories that what he calls The Naming of Lights—and what Earth wizards know as The Book of Night With Moon—has gone missing. Suddenly, the story is not just about allowing Nita and Kit to reclaim their own names, but about making sure that the definition of everything in existence is preserved. One advisory wizard explains:

“When you use [the Speech], you define what you’re speaking about. That’s why it’s dangerous to use the Speech carelessly. You can accidentally redefine something, change its nature. […] The Book of Night with Moon is written in the Speech. In it, everything’s described. Everything. […] It’s one of the reasons we’re all here—the power of those descriptions helps keep everything that is, in existence.” (51)

The quest to find The Book of Night With Moon takes Nita and Kit straight out of their universe and into one “next door,” where carnivorous taxi cabs prowl the streets of Manhattan and living things cower in the shadow of Life’s great antagonist, the Lone Power, who invented death and set it loose among the worlds, and who spends his days tricking species after species into accepting his “gift.” There’s some sneaking, some fighting, some injuries, and a whole lot of running—but when it comes down to it, the final battle to keep The Book of Night With Moon and to preserve the universe in working order is fought with words. In the book that describes everything, exactly as it is, Nita and Kit find the section that describes the Lone Power. To gain influence over him, and to come out the winners, all they need to do is finish reading his name—because encapsulated in the Lone One’s name is his first banishment, and to read that name again is to re-enact the expulsion from grace, the fall from heaven, the removal (even if only temporarily) from a space of influence over this universe.

As far as magic goes, it’s rather straightforward: read the name, and banish Life’s eternal enemy into darkness (at least for a time). But Nita and Kit understand something important about the value of names, something that comes not only from their training as wizards, but from years of enduring taunts and name-calling. They understand what it means to allow what others call you—perhaps even what you come to call yourself—to overcome and ultimately become who you are, limiting the possibility for change and growth. And that’s not something they would wish upon anyone, the Lone Power included.

If only there were some way he could be otherwise if he wanted to. For here was his name, a long splendid flow of syllables in the Speech, wild and courageous in its own way—and it said that he had not always been so hostile; that he got tired sometimes of being wicked, but his pride and his fear of being ridiculed would never let him stop. Never, forever, said the symbol at the very end of his name, the closed circle that binds spells into an unbreakable cycle and indicates lives bound the same way.

[…]

…she knew what she had to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she pulled out her pen, her best pen that Fred had saved and changed. She clicked it open. The metal still tingled against her skin, the ink at the point still glittered oddly—the same glitter as the ink in which the bright Book was written. Nita bent quickly over the Book and, with the pen, in lines of light, drew from that final circle an arrow pointing upward, the way out, the symbol that said change could happen—if, only if—and together they finished the Starsnuffer’s name in the Speech, said the new last syllable, made it real. (145)

What started out as a simple desire to regain a lost pen directly precipitates the greatest and most significant change in the novel, and the pen itself is the tool Nita uses, not just to defeat the Lone Power, but to give him the room to change his nature—to remove the trappings of eons and become something beyond what he has formerly been. This might seem strange for a number of reasons, but in a universe that values the power of linguistic agency so highly, it is anything but. The pen is an object of power, a tool for writing one’s own history instead of succumbing to the definitions of others. Nita rewrites the Lone One’s name from a perspective inconceivable to those who have bullied her throughout the years, and probably quite inconceivable to the Lone One himself: rather than attempting to restrict or to bind him, she turns his name and all of the connotative baggage it entails into something that can set him free.

If the novel ended there, it would still constitute a powerful argument for the magic inherent in language. But it goes a step further. Rather than concluding with Nita and Kit’s heroic victory over the Lone Power and their triumphant return of The Book of Night With Moon to the appropriate authorities, the novel ends where it began, with Nita and Joanne face to face once more. This time, they exchange words rather than punches:

I don’t know what to say to her, we have absolutely nothing in common, Nita thought frantically. But it has to start somewhere. She swallowed and did her best to look Joanne in the eye, calmly and not in threat. “Come over to my place after supper sometime and look through my telescope,” she said. “I’ll show you Jupiter’s moons. Or Mars—” (150)

Nita still can’t keep her mouth shut. But what makes her a target for bullying at the beginning of the novel has turned into a tool for disarming bullies by the novel’s end. Wizardry offers Nita the opportunity to see the positive uses to which all language, not just the Speech, can be put. Rather than keeping this knowledge to herself, she shares it—even with a bully who can’t quite be trusted to listen.

Ultimately, Duane shares the same message with her readers. After all, we are reading a book with the same title as Nita’s wizard’s manual. Just as Nita learns a new language from her copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard, we can learn one from ours. Even if we can’t become wizards and fight evil throughout the worlds, we can become kinder and more considerate people who use plain English to break the cycle of violence within our home lives—and to Duane, this work is just as important as that carried out by wizards with all their powers:

A wizard’s business is to conserve energy—to keep it from being wasted. On the simplest level this includes such unmagical-looking actions as paying one’s bills on time, turning off the lights when you go out, and supporting the people around you in getting their lives to work. (16)

Throughout the novel, Duane transforms not just “unmagical-looking actions” but the commonplace and often unmagical-looking given of language itself. All words, it seems, can be “magic” when used properly. And if “a spell always works” (150)—if language always, no matter how gradually, effects the changes it seeks—then it’s not just wizards who have a duty to make sure that the power of language is used for good.

All citations are from Support Your Local Wizard, an omnibus edition of the first three novels in the Young Wizard series.

Tailor Made

One of my favorite feelings upon reading a book is the sensation that, somehow mysteriously, the author has written this specifically for me. It doesn't crop up too often, so I know it when I feel it -- that headlong rush into stunningly familiar territory, the thrill of discovery underwritten by a sense of comfort at the fact that you and the book exist within the same universe, have the same notions of right and wrong and have come to a basic agreement as to how stories should work.

But there's a flip side to this coin. Sometimes, my reactions to these kinds of books seem so intricately (and intimately) tied up in specific strands of my personality that I'm wary of recommending them to others who don't share my values and obsessions. More often than not, I'm afraid to admit the depth of my affection for these books, despite feeling like my bookshelves are empty when I don't have them near. Maybe it's because I move in academic circles and the books that have hit me in this way are mostly not academic. Maybe it's because I'm afraid what portrait of me might be constructed from the books that I feel drawn to in this way. And maybe I'm just afraid to think about what this list of books might tell me about myself -- about what I see as fundamentally me, what I care about, what makes my heart beat.

Whatever the reason, I'm about to (begin to) find out, because here -- for the moment -- is my list.

So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane

On the run from bullies, Nita Callahan takes refuge in the children's room of her local public library and finds a book called So You Want to Be a Wizard. At first she's sure that it must be a joke, but she picks it up and begins to read it -- and the moment when it stopped being a joke for her is the moment I would have known (or at least so furiously desired) the same:

Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first. But their love for and fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned with. Their ability to convince a piece of the world — a tree, say, or a stone — that it’s not what it thinks it is, that it’s something else, is the very heart of wizardry. Words skilfully used, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind, are the wizard’s most basic tools. With them a wizard can stop a tidal wave, talk a tree out of growing, or into it — freeze fire, burn rain — even slow down the heat death of the Universe.

That last, of course, is the reason there are wizards. See the next chapter.

Nita's copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard goes on to change her life. My copy continues to change mine.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I have a complicated relationship to this novel, but it all started when I was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, just starting to take life and literature (and love) seriously, and searching for a paradigm that would speak to the struggle that I felt, but would do so without rejecting the goals I'd set for myself. I don't exactly understand how this came to pass, but Jane Eyre helped me find those answers I hadn't even known I was looking for Four years later, I've read it for at least three other (college) English courses. Thumbing through my well-worn Oxford Classics copy (thoroughly underlined, festooned with Post-its and dripping with marginalia) in search of a single quote that would sum up this book's impact on me, I find it impossible to choose just one, because so many of the words of this book are like old friends, pleased to meet me in my re-perusal.

Heart's Blood by Juliet Marillier

When I first read this book, I was overcome with a sense that this was the novel I had always wanted to write. In fact, its plot is in some ways quite similar to the one I've been trying to write for five years: a retelling/homage to the story of Beauty and the Beast, which pits an educated heroine against a culture that cannot value her education and carefully questions what it means to be a "beast" and what it means to be a man from within a richly-defined world. Marillier's tale departs from mine in many ways (not the least of which being that her version is finished and published), but I nonetheless feel a connection to it that ignores its occasional flaws in favor of lovingly attending to the moments where everything happens just as it ought. And from my perspective, at least, there are many moments like these.

Possession by A. S. Byatt

"Do you ever have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects — all the time — and I suppose one studies — I study — literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful — as though we held a clue to the true nature of things?"

I knew long before this passage of dialogue that Possession had been written with me in mind, but this is perhaps one of the most coherent examples of why this book speaks to me in a voice at once wise and familiar. Roland's hesitant shift from "one studies" to "I study" speaks to the dilemma of every modern academic, but particularly those in the humanities: how much of me is meant to be in what I do? The questions he asks here are in some senses rhetorical -- he wants, like I want, to believe that there is some "clue to the true nature of things" secreted away within literature -- but also intensely doubting. Who is he -- who am I -- to say that things even have a true nature at all? And yet. By the end of that second sentence, the question that he started all those interjections ago isn't really a question at all.

Moving Eastward

Sometimes I wonder how much of my life has been influenced by where I grew up.

I'm the daughter of a nurse and a high school English teacher-turned-administrator. They moved into the house I grew up in when I was a little under a year old. They picked it because it was close to the best healthcare and in the same district as the best public schools, and because it was safe and suburban and the kind of place where you want your kids to grow up.

For eighteen years, I lived in a city that only became a city the year before I was born, in a house that was "old" for the area because it had been built in the 1970s. I lived in a community that depended on cars and scoffed at public transportation, where the hum and rush of traffic along the 5 freeway was ubiquitous the way the sound of waves is to people who live along the shore. I lived in the kind of suburban city that is no longer even a suburb of anywhere, except for the suburbs themselves. The closest major city was Los Angeles, all spread out and gleaming and so emphatically and insistently new, but even LA was an hour away, and for eighteen years, I probably spent 90% of my time within a fifteen-mile radius of home.

My parents grew up within that radius. When my mother was in high school, her family hosted an Italian exchange student. Mom remembers showing Beatrice all the sights around where she lived, but specifically, she remembers showing her to Mission San Juan Capistrano. Founded by the Spanish in 1776, when much of California was under their control, it's one of the oldest things there is around here. Mom had always found it pretty impressive, but seeing it with Beatrice, she realized how strange it must seem to a girl who grew up just outside of Rome that the oldest thing around was just over two hundred years old.

The American dream, for better or for worse, is about conquering new places and building new lives. As a culture, we're still dealing with the myth of the west as a grand frontier, the newest part of the New World, the place where you go to remake yourself. But it doesn't seem that way to someone who's grown up there. Aside from intermittent travels and nine months spent studying in London, I've lived my whole life on the west coast of the United States, and somewhere along the line, being surrounded by so much that was "new" just got old.

For a while, I've wanted something very different. I want to live at a center of things, a place to which everyone feels connected by a depth of history almost unimaginable from the perspective of a southern California suburb. I want, not the movement to the unexplored and uncharted, but to trace my steps back across the American plains and to the cities where my ancestors first landed on this continent -- back even further, across the Atlantic Ocean to the ports of Europe, where once those same ancestors mingled and shared a cigarette or two before boarding the ships that would take them across this bridge of water to a new world. I don't want the new world, having grown up with it. I want to reclaim some of what is old, some of what lasts.

Moving to New York seems like a twentysomething's rite of passage. (After all, hasn't American television taught us that everything that's anything happens in New York City?) But for me, it's more than that. It's about reversing the movement west, the movement to the new. It's not about leaving something behind me, but getting something back. And I wonder: if you grow up on the edge of things, in the place that used to be a frontier, the place where the American Dream ends, how is your cultural narrative different because of it? I grew up in the west. Maybe that's why I feel so much destiny in moving east.

A Bigger Doorstep: The Importance of Living Abroad

I participated in Model United Nations all through high school. I was one of the more active delegates in our program, never missing a conference if I could help it. Over those four years, I accumulated binders and binders of research on the topics I found myself debating most frequently. I could tell you the details of conflicts going on all over the world. But I never felt like I was connected to them. I was far enough away to be objective, and as tragic as all of it was, it wasn't happening on my doorstep.

The past few months, I've been realizing that my doorstep is a whole lot bigger than it used to be, and for a pretty simple reason: I spent a year studying in another country, and I made friends with people who had done the same.

When the earthquake hit Japan, one of my friends had just returned from a month spent traveling there. Another friend had previously lived there for six months through a study abroad program.

When terrorism hit Oslo, my Norwegian friend -- whom I met while she was studying abroad for a semester in Berkeley -- had just left Norway to spend another semester abroad, this time in Australia.

And when north London broke out in riots, I heard about it on Twitter and Facebook before it was on the news, because I studied there for a year and most of my friends live in the areas most heavily affected.

When I searched Twitter looking for news of any disturbances in Mile End, the London neighborhood where I used to live, I found this picture of the Budgens grocery store where I shopped when I was too lazy to make the walk down to the Sainsbury's in Whitechapel. I found that the houseboats that usually moor along one side of Regent's Canal switched over to the other side as a way of avoiding riot damage because, to access that side from the street, you need to get past the security guards sitting behind the gate into the campus of Queen Mary University of London. That campus is where I lived and studied. This is my doorstep.

A lot of adults (and a lot of college students, too) seem to think that the point of taking a semester or a year abroad is to goof off in a foreign country where the academic expectations are low and the drinking age is lower, where any misbehavior can be excused by saying, "I'm an American!" This isn't why I decided to live in London for a year. But even those who sign up for study abroad programs with the expectation that it will be one big party have the chance to stumble across the lessons I've learned from it. No matter your intention, if you spend enough time somewhere else, you'll find yourself connecting with people in a way that animates the places they live, the struggles they witness, and the hardships they suffer.

It's one thing to talk about globalization and large-scale human interdependence -- it's another thing entirely to feel it within the network of your friends, spread out across the globe. The earthquake in Japan becomes something that could have happened to Kat or Natasha; the bombing in Oslo is something Sidsel just missed; and the London riots are going on walking distance from where Cara and Kaite and Alastair and Abbi and so many other friends live. It hurts, sometimes -- but that's because I'm connected, and because I care. And I'll take that over the world-weary "more bad news as usual" any day.

Perspective

Recently, Time Magazine released color photos of London in the aftermath of the Blitz. It's amazing to see the kind of devastation that London and its people managed to withstand, but the picture that strikes me the hardest is of a small church standing undisturbed on a block where most of the other buildings have been bombed to rubble. Because I know that church. I visited it last year, when I was living in London. It's not very large, and not very famous, but it's where John Milton -- author of Paradise Lost -- is buried, and where his father was buried before him, and so I went to pay my respects. Three hundred and thirty-six years after his death, I'm sure a lot has changed, but the place still stands. On the outside, at least, it looks just like it did fifty years ago, enough so that I could recognize it in an old photo having only been there once. Some form of church has stood at the site of the present St. Giles' Cripplegate since 1090.

To a girl who grew up in a city that was only incorporated a year before she was born, the sense of depth to human history embodied in this single space is awe-inspiring. When Michel de Certeau says that haunted places are the only ones people can live in, I think this is what he means. I'm sure not everyone would agree with him -- I know plenty of people who live just fine without the past ghosting about their everyday routines -- but I do believe there's something about these "haunted places" that makes them paradoxically more alive, and more worthy of being enriched with a portion of my life, than any corner of Outer Suburbia ever could be.

Shitty First Drafts

I participated in my first writers' workshop when I was seventeen. My instructor shared a lot of quotes with us about writing, and whether we all agreed or disagreed with them, I've always remembered them -- but none as well as Hemingway's statement that "The first draft of anything is shit." It might not be the best philosophy for turning out work in a timely fashion, but for better or worse, my writing strategy pretty much depends on it.

I suspect this might have something to do with the fact that the first long-form writing I ever did was for National Novel Writing Month. It's a challenge that actually encourages quantity over quality -- participants strive to write 50,000 words during the month of November, with good words counting no more than bad ones and everyone who hits 50k being considered a winner -- but does so with the underlying assumption that if you write enough, you're bound to write something good. I don't know if it works that way for everyone, having a steady daily wordcount and a group of supportive fellow writers always helps me tune out my "inner editor" and ultimately go places with my writing that I otherwise might not have.

In the past six years, I've written anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000 words of fiction each November -- even continuing to work on one project sporadically until I finally typed "the end" at around 220,000 words. (For people not used to thinking in wordcounts, that's over twice the length of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and about four times as long as Fahrenheit 451.) None of these projects were particularly good. But as Ernest Hemingway and NaNoWriMo have taught me, "good" is not what first drafts are about. It doesn't matter that these first drafts were shit: three of these November novels have nonetheless shown enough promise for me to continue work on them after the month was up.

Writing with the belief that first drafts don't have to be fabulous makes the second draft a whole lot harder. But without this mentality the first draft would probably never be written. If I agonize over every word of something, I'll never make it to the end of the chapter, much less the novel -- but if I turn out a first draft in a month or two, falling for the characters and the concepts along the way, it doesn't matter how hard the second draft will be, because I'll have dedicated myself to doing it. It's easy to quit a story you haven't finished writing. It's a lot harder to walk away from a finished first draft.

I've been thinking about all of this lately because I'm in the process of working on a real, hard, not-so-shit second draft of the former NaNo-novel that ended up clocking in at around 220k. It's agonizingly slow going, and I've already started a Word document just to keep track of all of the research I need to do and decisions I need to make before I start to write the third draft (having decided they are not major enough to require my concern in the second). But sometimes I sit and look at my computer screen and marvel at the fact that there even is a second draft-in-progress. Today is one of those days.

You can laugh all you want at the fact that I spend my Novembers frantically churning out shitty first drafts of novels that there is a 50% chance I will never want to look at once the month is over. God knows I laugh at myself sometimes. But when I'm done laughing, I knuckle down and start writing -- and in the end, that's the only thing that matters.

Narrative Nit-Picking

I will read almost anything. Yes, it's true that when left to my own devices I gravitate toward 19th-century English novels and/or young adult fiction and/or stuff with magic/wizards/aliens/spaceships, but I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to fiction. I spent a lot of my youth being frustrated by people around me who judged my favorite books by their genre, so I try my best not to repeat the behavior, and if someone I trust recommends a book to read, I will read it. I may not like it, but I'll certainly give it a try.

And yet there are some stylistic tics that bother me, across all genres. I realized this about two and a half years ago, when on the recommendation of several friends, I picked up The Time Traveler's Wife. It should have been right up my alley: urban fantasy (not that it packaged itself as such, but it was) mixed with a love story. I should have connected with it. Instead, I found myself turned off by three stylistic choices:

1. Narration in the first-person present tense

2. Multiple first-person narrators

3. Chapters beginning with the name of the present narrator

For whatever reason, these three things combined to create a style that kept me from liking the novel. Since then, I've only read one novel that makes the same three choices (Old Magic by Marianne Curley, which I read on vacation when I had run out of other books in a non-English-speaking country), but I've read many more that meet one or two of these criteria -- especially #1.

So why do these things bother me?? Is it just because I've been conditioned to believe that the first person should be an exclusive perspective, or that novels should be written in the past tense? Why is it that first person and present tense narration don't bother me when used separately, but feel so inelegant in combination?

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say part of it is about the conditioning. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of present-tense novels I've read, and they are by and large very recent productions (excluding portions of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, because including it would just open up a whole new can of worms). Same goes for novels with multiple first-person narrators -- although these have been more prevalent in the literary canon, with Wilkie Collins infamously producing novels like The Moonstone out of a series of stitched-together witness accounts.

But part of it may go deeper than that. How often do you find yourself thinking or speaking about yourself in the present tense? Not the present progressive -- "I'm doing this, I'm going here" -- but the present -- "I do this, I go here"? Maybe this is just me, but I don't go around narrating my life to myself as it happens. So when a character in a book starts, effectively, to do just that, it sounds strange because it's not a mode of speech I'm used to.

In contrast, first-person past tense isn't as strange. We're all used to relating stories of what we've done after-the-fact. We're incredibly familiar with third-person past-tense, as it is, essentially, the narrative mode of gossip: "He did this, they went there, and she wore that hideous dress." I'm not sure how third-person present-tense narration fits into all of this (and to the best of my knowledge I've never read any long-form works in this style), but for whatever reason, "He walks across the room" is easier in my head than "I walk across the room."

Still, this isn't to say that good works of fiction can't be written in the first-person present-tense. I flew through Holly Black's White Cat despite its use of this exact style, and now that I'm halfway through the sequel, Red Glove, I hardly even notice the narration as strange. Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, though not as much to my taste as the Curseworkers novels have proven to be so far, also uses the same style and is no less worth reading because of it.

Maybe I've realized that it's stupid to dislike books specifically for their style of narration. Or maybe I've just read enough of this style, now, to be conditioned out of seeing it as anything out of the ordinary.

Age Appropriate? What We Do--and Don't--Tell Kids to Read

I'm sure everyone and his mother has opinions about the age appropriateness of certain books, and that the large community of YA readers, writers, reviewers, and their mothers have more opinions than most. Until recently, I was pretty sure I didn't have opinions like that. My parents never really monitored my reading when I was growing up, though we always did talk about it, and I loved nothing more than doing just that. I read a lot, even as a kid, devouring pretty much all the fiction I could get my hands on -- most of it found while browsing my school or public library, or the local bookstore.

As a member of the Harry Potter generation -- and as someone whose love of fantasy was rekindled by those books -- I grew up at the forefront of some of the biggest debates about age suitability and parents controlling what their kids read, and all of it struck me as incredibly strange. I distinctly remember being very puzzled as to why one of my friends, to whom I was incredibly grateful for introducing me to the Chronicles of Narnia, wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter. (Him: They have witches and wizards! Me: So does C. S. Lewis. And the White Witch is scarier than Voldemort. Him: But the Chronicles of Narnia are Christian books! Me: Have you noticed they always celebrate Christmas at Hogwarts?) Aside from the fact that telling the average kid not to do something is the best way to ensure he does just that (something J. K. Rowling thoroughly understands -- look at what happens in Order of the Phoenix when Umbridge tries to ban the Quibbler), telling kids not to read things just never made sense to me.

But now that I am slightly older, with two younger cousins coming to me for reading recommendations, I'm realizing that there's another side to parental control of reading -- not just what grown-ups forbid, but what they never recommend.

Over the past week, I've read two young adult novels -- Jane Yolen's Dragon's Blood, first published in 1982, and Holly Black's White Cat, first published in 2010 -- and although they're very different novels, they got me thinking again about the question of content and age suitability.

Dragon's Blood takes place on a desert planet where one of the main businesses (and pastimes) is training dragons to fight each other. The planet's economy depends upon a system of indentured servitude, with people trying to earn enough coins to fill their bags and buy free of their debts. The story follows fifteen-year-old Jakkin as he attempts to do just this by stealing a dragon egg and raising the hatchling to become a fighter. By all rights I should recommend this book to my cousin -- what teenage boy, or girl for that matter, doesn't like reading about dragons? -- but I'm not sure I will. While male indentured servants tend to fill their bags by working in dragon hatcheries, as Jakkin does, most of the (male) characters in the novel seem to think that the only way for female indentured servants to do the same is to work at brothels -- which are so connected to these indebted women that they are known as "baggeries," where women work to fill their bags. On the one hand, it's probably realistic that a kid who works at a middle-of-nowhere dragon hatchery wouldn't have encountered or heard stories of other jobs for indentured women. And on the world that Yolen has set up, it might be that there aren't many. But I'm not exactly sure this is the kind of book I want my young male cousin to be reading.

White Cat, aside from possessing a teenaged male protagonist, is a very different story. Seventeen-year-old Cassel lives in a world remarkably like this one, except for the fact that he comes from a family of curse workers, whose (technically illegal) powers let them do everything from changing people's luck to manipulating emotions to breaking bones, all with the touch of an ungloved hand. Cassel's the only one in the family who isn't a "worker," but it doesn't keep him from getting all tied up in his elder brothers' mafia connections or having to deal with the fact that his mom's in jail for using her abilities. The result is that he feels way older than the average seventeen-year-old, and in some ways the book seems "older," too -- to the point that some reviewers have complained that it is far too violent to be a young adult read. In White Cat, people beat people up, lie and cheat and steal, break into houses, and take orders from organized crime syndicates without any of this seeming particularly out-of-the-ordinary. At moments it is unabashedly violent. And yet my gut response is that I'd be more likely to recommend it to my cousin than Dragon's Blood, and not just because it's a better novel. For some reason, I don't feel the need to shelter him from violence the way I feel like I should be directing him away from even oblique (but pervasive) references to sex slavery.

Thinking further about this comparison, it's not like White Cat contains glowing female role models. In fact, I don't think I particularly like any of the female characters, at least not yet, largely because the ones who could possibly be likable feel underdeveloped in comparison to Cassel and his brothers (though I haven't read the sequel yet, and Red Glove could very well change this). But this doesn't change my gut feeling about the difference between these two novels. Maybe it's just because I feel more of a connection with Cassel's homework headaches and coffee consumption and family drama than I do with Jakkin's hard labor and boyish crushes, whereas my younger cousin -- still in junior high -- might have the reverse experience? Or maybe it's because mainstream media is clogged with sex and violence, desensitizing me to the impact of murder and corruption even in what is, ostensibly, a book for children? Or maybe I'm just crazy, and should never be allowed to recommend books to anyone under the age of eighteen.

All I really know is this: only some kids are like me, wandering libraries and bookstores in their free time, browsing book catalogs and standing on tip-toe to check out the books on the family bookshelves. Most kids only read what people suggest they should. And this makes me wonder, is there a point where not suggesting a book is just as bad as telling a kid not to read it in the first place?

Read These Books: Something Like a Top 5 List

A few months ago, something I can no longer remember prompted me to attempt to make a list of my fifteen favorite books. The list got to about twelve, but trying to figure out the last three was hell -- every time I thought of one book that deserved to be added, another three or four equally deserving titles came to mind, and while the list did still have room for some of them, it most definitely did not have room for all of them.

I was reminded of this list by a recent New York Times article where staffers shared lists of their top five favorite novels. I skimmed down their picks, noting that perhaps predictably, the only crossovers between their lists and mine fell in the field of nineteenth-century British novels (specifically ones by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot). I'm fairly certain no one listed a novel published before Sense and Sensibility, and most of the picks fell within what I like to think of as the margin of literary respectability -- they're all the kinds of books that it would be acceptable for NYT staffers to publicly admit to loving.

What follows is something like my list: more than five (but less than fifteen) books that keep me coming back for more (ordered by publication date, because picking out the best books is hard enough without having to decide exactly how they measure up to each other as well).

Paradise Lost by John Milton. One of the few books I fell in love with in a classroom, and largely because of the classroom -- but then again, I'm not sure there's any other way I would have willingly read a seventeenth-century epic rewriting of the book of Genesis. I could babble on about how he makes use of key poetic devices like chiasmus and enjambment, but you don't have to understand literary terminology to realize that his language, though difficult, is beautiful, and deserves to be read one word at a time. (Also, where else are you going to find a description of angels having sex in iambic pentameter?)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Michael Cunningham, in an essay on Mrs. Dalloway, says, "Everybody who reads has a first book -- maybe not the first book you read, but the first book that shows you what literature can be. Like a first kiss. As you read other books, you kiss other people, but especially for those who are romantically inclined, that first book stays with you." When I first came across this quote, I knew I had finally discovered a way to explain what Pride and Prejudice meant to me. When I read it for the first time, at the age of fifteen, I had no idea that it would propel me forward through an English honors thesis at Berkeley and into a graduate program at Columbia -- but it most certainly has.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Another good candidate for my "first book" that I keep coming back to because, while it has its issues both in terms of writing quality and underlying ideology, Jane is a protagonist whose emotional journey I can believe in and gather some kind of personal strength from. It's a book that I have grown up with, and that allows me to mark my growth each time I read it (which seems to happen about once a year, whether I intend it or not).

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. In addition to being one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language, Eliot is remarkable for the way she dangles potentially bright futures in front of her protagonists and her readers only to snatch them away and replace them with everyday monotony. Even more remarkable is her ability to make me loathe the way this particular novel ends, while simultaneously forcing me to evaluate the source of my loathing -- my personal adherence to some of the same conventions that her work persistently critiques. But if all that sounds too depressingly academic, do not despair: what really kept me reading this novel was the inimitable spirit of its protagonist, Maggie Tulliver, who I would compare to a combination of Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre if she weren't so thoroughly herself.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Yes, this is a bit of a jump in time, but a lot of 20th-century literature just doesn't float my boat. Bradbury's classic has been co-opted into the "literature" section of the bookstores, but it will always hold a place in my heart as one of the first novels that showed me exactly what futuristic fiction could do. I've posted before about why you should read this book, and I stand by all of it.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. This novel does what science fiction does best: it makes you think, not just about aliens and the future and advanced technology, but about humanity in the present. And it does that gently, unobtrusively, by giving you one hell of a compelling story. Genly Ai, a human, is sent to the planet Gethen to make contact with its unique local population. Gethenians are all effectively genderless 95% of the time, and when they do take on sex characteristics for the purpose of intercourse, they can become either "male" or "female" -- so that someone who has fathered a child might easily mother another. Though it's often classified as a feminist novel, I feel it's less about trying to imagine a world without gender and more about getting to the heart of the binaries that tend to shape our own way of thinking by positing an environment in which many of these could be deconstructed.

Possession by A. S. Byatt. I debated a while over whether to add this book to my list, because while it is many things, it is not perfect -- but it's perfect for me. It's a novel that parallels the research of two modern scholars of Victorian poetry with the secret romance between the two (fictional) poets they study. It's an incredibly heterogeneous text, combining standard third-person narration, academic articles, fragments of poetry, and the poets' lost letters to create a sprawling meditation on the relationship between literature and love.

A Thousand Words for Stranger by Julie E. Czerneda. This would be the novel that first kindled my interest in alien characters and probably put the "aliens" in the title of this blog! I've written elsewhere that it reads very much like a first novel, with all the uncertainties and issues of pacing that one might expect, but even knowing its flaws, I can't help being in love with it. Told from the first-person perspective of a humanoid alien woman struggling to defeat the amnesia that left her with no way of knowing why she's being chased through the galaxy, at first glance it may seem to be no more than an unappealing collection of sci-fi tropes. But at least in my opinion, Czerneda gets that you're allowed to deal with the tropes as long as you infuse them with heart, and her characters -- human and alien alike -- come alive because of this. It's a beautiful way of thinking about what it might mean to see humanity through alien eyes.

The Wizard's Dilemma by Diane Duane. I love everything that Diane Duane writes, but when forced to pick a single book of hers that I love the most, this one always wins. In fact, when silly people force me to pick just one favorite book, this is usually the book that I pick. Yes, it is a book about teenage wizards -- but before that scares you off, it's also a book that deals with the kinds of problems that wizardry can't solve, or maybe could solve but shouldn't. It's about finding hope in the midst of grief and love that defies pain, and all the other things that make me love Duane's Young Wizards series to begin with.

I would list the runners-up that didn't make it onto the list, whether because I've only read them once, haven't actually finished reading them, haven't read them in a while, or already had listed a better book by the same author...but if I did that, the list would probably triple, and besides, that's not really the point.

So, if you were making a list of five (or ten, or fifteen) favorite books, what would be on it?

Why I Love Young Wizards

When I first started this blog almost a year ago, my goal was clear: I needed someplace to squee, rant, and flail -- albeit in a slightly more academic manner -- about the things that I loved most in life and literature. Up at the top of the flail-worthy list is, and has always been, Diane Duane's Young Wizards series. I started reading these books when I was in the sixth grade, waiting for something to fill the void between Harry Potter books, and ended up falling head over heels for characters and a story and a world that made Harry Potter look like child's play, even to an eleven-year-old.

Since then, I've been attempting (and failing) to come up with some coherent way to express my love for this series while simultaneously making every single person who read my explanation go to their local library and find a copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard. I've recommended the series to everyone I know. I've posted about it on other sites. I've even made my mother read it.

None of this has served the ultimate purpose: to create a world in which all the cool people have read these books. This post probably won't either. But in the wake of Diane Duane's release of the long-form blurb for the tenth book in the series, tentatively titled Games Wizards Play, I feel the need to talk a little more about why these books have such a special place in my heart.

1. These are books for geeks, by a geek, that understand and make no apologies for their own geekiness (while simultaneously feeling very accessible to people who wouldn't necessarily class themselves as geeks). To the teenager I was, they were valuable because they showed me that people like me -- nerdy bookworms who'd been reading chapter books since age four and owned library cards before their peers even knew where the library was -- were important, and lovable, and not alone. To this day, these books inspire me to embrace my geek, and to be proud of it, even in circles (read: academia) where this is unexpected if not exactly unacceptable. If I'd known more geeky adults growing up, I doubt I ever would have felt uncomfortable being who I was.

2. These books have wizards. AND aliens. AND alien wizards. To phrase it as one of Duane's main characters might, it's like there really are Jedi out there. I pretty much can't think of a better sort of universe to live in. (Yes, I am a geek. See point #1.)

3. These books are also very firmly grounded in what grown-ups very frequently call "the real world." The initial protagonists, Kit and Nita, are young teens in the New York suburbs who find themselves having to juggle wizardry with the rest of their lives, with varied results. This is urban fantasy at its best, integrating what we know with what we don't and paying particular attention to the seams between these pieces.

4. The register of the books can slip from comic to dramatic in a matter of instants without the shift seeming awkward or forced. Furthermore, the jokes are funny, and the climactic scenes are stomach-clenching.

5. The language is spot-on. The dialogue sounds like the kind of dialogue that people might actually speak, and Duane's descriptive prose is so stunningly beautiful that I still stand back in awe of some passages. And she switches between the sort of mundane "invisible" prose and this more heavily-wrought description so flawlessly that I'm never startled by it, and only upon looking back do I realize that the shift has happened.

6. Diane Duane remembers her childhood. She doesn't assume that kids can't do things or that their experience of life is fundamentally different from adults'. As such, she writes kids who are fully, believably, and lovably kids. She doesn't idealize childhood as a problem-free zone, and she's great at tackling the kinds of problems that kids really do have in a real and respectful manner.

7. Unlike most young adult fantasy, which seems only capable of granting power to children in the absence of their parents, the Young Wizards series shows that parents and children can work together and be open and honest and loving with each other, while still allowing children to be who they are and make their own decisions. There are no evil stepmothers or wicked stepfathers here.

8. Magic doesn't fix everything. In fact, it often seems to make things more complicated: for example, if you get into a fight with your best friend you can ignore him for a while, but if your best friend also happens to be your partner in wizardry, you'll have to work it out sooner rather than later. Wizardry never functions as a deus ex machina, and thus is never cheapened -- but there are some things that it just can't do.

9. Magic isn't easy. Harry Potter might have been my "gateway drug" into YA fantasy, but in retrospect the idea that you can just point a wand and say a word to do a spell seems so simplistic. Duane's magic is difficult, something that must be learned and for which you must pay a price, but this makes mastering it all the more worthwhile.

10. The metaphysics of the Young Wizards universe might hinge on the expected cosmic good-and-evil axis, but they do so in complex ways that are never moralizing. Duane's vision of a wizardly afterlife known as Timeheart, where "what's loved survives," is the most poignant and -- to use a word you don't hear too often -- just that I have ever encountered. If I could trade whatever metaphysical reality we live in now for any specific fictional one, it would be this one.

11. Words are magical. While a lot of fantasy authors craft systems of magic around the use of specific words, or magical languages, I haven't read one to beat Duane's -- and I've read a lot. More importantly, though, it's not just words spoken in the wizardly Speech that matter. These novels persistently value the act of talking, in any language, with other people. Sometimes it's about solving disputes, or breaking barriers, or fighting past prejudices, but sometimes it's just about getting to know amiable beings a little bit better.

12. School matters. These aren't kids who just prance around saving the world and miraculously getting A's on everything without having to study. They have to work for their grades the same way they have to work for their wizardry.

13. You don't have to be a wizard to be important. Throughout the course of the series, we meet several characters who know about magic but aren't themselves wizards, and Duane is very insistent that they don't need to be wizards in order to make a difference. Thus, there is hope for us all.

14. Minor characters are incredibly well-developed. Some of them even come back later on and stop being quite so minor. I haven't met a single person in the novels so far who I didn't feel like I knew, somehow, even after just a couple of pages.

15. Alien characters are incredibly well-developed. By this, I mean that they do seem alien, with separate cultures and worldviews and all that comes along with it, but are never quite so alien that you wouldn't consider having one as a friend.

16. Duane deals with Important Life Issues without it ever feeling like "dealing with Important Life Issues" is what these novels are about. The philosophy seems to be that life is full of these big important things, and any novel attempting to accurately portray something like life will necessarily involve these, too. As a result, the novels involve themselves in questions of bullying, sacrifice, depression, politics, death, religion, friendship, love, and beyond -- without ever feeling like they're trying to teach you something. To (mis)quote one of her characters, life doesn't have a moral, though sometimes it is one.

17. At the bottom of all of this lies a fundamental wonder at the universe -- a desire to get to know it better, to help it be the best it can, and to engage other people in doing the same. To me, this wonder is at the heart of childhood, and something that adults too easily forget. It's also at the heart of science fiction done right.

18. Last (for now) -- but not least -- these novels continue to meet me where I am in my life, and offer me something new each time. I've been reading and re-reading them now for almost half of my life, and they never fail to be exactly what I need.

Books with Pictures

Comic books -- or should I say "graphic novels"? -- are coming up in the world, but as far as my experience is concerned, people still don't take you entirely seriously if you enjoy reading them. This strikes me as incredibly silly. One of the prevailing tests of "culture" in the western world seems to be one's ability to appreciate the visual arts; another is, of course, one's ability to appreciate the literary arts. So why is it that an artform which combines the visual and literary, often in stunning and innovative ways, gets such a bad rap?

Part of it, I suspect, stems from the fact that "picture books" are considered the province of children, "comic books" the domain of adolescents, and "chapter books" the signal that one has moved up into something like (young) adulthood. The smaller the print, and the fewer the pictures, the more "grown-up" something is. But this makes the huge mistake of equating literary form with content. While it's true that a lot of books for kids have pictures, and most books for adults don't, this doesn't mean that the picture book is an inherently poor medium for addressing "grown-up" ideas. I'll be the first to admit that I have only read a limited number of what I think of as picture books for grown-ups, but the ones that I have read have blown me away. Art Spiegelman famously uses the format to tell the story of his father's struggles as a Jew in Nazi Germany, and his own struggles with what his father's history means to him. Shaun Tan's work is more whimsical -- I fell in love with one story in Tales from Outer Suburbia about the afterlife of lost or discarded notes and scribblings -- but even if his subject matter doesn't always appear complex, his treatment is always nuanced. (If you want to read a really good essay on picture books by someone who knows them better than I do, check out his "Picture Books: Who Are They For?".)

Most recently, I've been working my way through the ten volumes of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, which feel about as intertextual as a T. S. Eliot poem, full of references to mythologies, history, and history, western and eastern, modern and ancient -- and still manage to keep this allusion in the background and tell a series of compelling stories about identity, duty, personal choice, and the things that make us human. When the cover tells you the story is "suggested for mature readers," I like to believe that this isn't because there's sex or violence or other things people don't want to think their kids are reading (though sometimes there is). It's because it takes a mature mind to appreciate the complexity of the universe Gaiman has crafted. I don't see how any reader could fail to take seriously a text in which the character of Lucifer ironically quotes from John Milton's Paradise Lost -- and then cites his own quotation!

Some of the stigma against comics may also stem from the assumption that they are newfangled inventions of an unpredictable popular culture, therefore lacking the respectability of tradition and elite status. There is a much larger question at hand here, about what constitutes "popular" and what constitutes "literary" (and why the two should be considered separately, if they should be at all), but on the small scale it seems important to point out that supposedly "literary" works have been relying on pictures for hundreds of years. Dickens and Thackeray both supervised the illustration of many of their major novels (with Thackeray even contributing his own illustrations, in come cases). William Blake is the prime example: he invented his own reverse-etching technique and hand-etched his poems alongside images that he watercolored after they had been printed. To call them "illustrations" is to miss the point; often, instead of simply "illustrating" the kinds of things discussed in the poems, Blake's images provide additional clues to interpretation, or serve to increase readerly confusion. Since all the pages were colored by hand, no two are the same, and radically different versions of the same poem exist -- for example, look at these two different prints of "The Tyger":

(If you're looking for more, check out the Blake Archive, where you can access images of Blake's works held in different collections across the world.)

So, if comics aren't "kid stuff" and they aren't really "new," what's the problem? As a final guess, I'd suggest that, while we live in a world that bombards us with thousands of images on a daily basis, we're only very rarely asked to read them. Comics, graphic novels, picture books -- call them what you will, this is exactly what they demand of us. By juxtaposing images and text, they call attention to the fact that pictures, in addition to simply being seen, can be read, and they challenge us to perform this reading, which is a challenge precisely because so many of the images we encounter on a daily basis seem to demand internalization without reading (just think of most advertising). In the process, they make some people a little uncomfortable -- but if art doesn't do that, at least a little, then I'm not entirely sure it is art to begin with.

For the Love of Books

I love books.

This is a fundamental fact of my existence, and I've known it for as long as I can remember. Literally. Some of my first memories are of being read to, and learning to read. I still own the first book I read on my own (The Berenstein Bears and the Spooky Old Tree), and unless I seriously dislike a book, I am loathe to actually give it up. Even if I don't necessarily plan on re-reading it, there has always been something special about having it.

At least, until now. Even though college has kept me separated from the majority of my book collection for the past four years (excepting vacations), it's not until now that I've realized how many of these books I am actually capable of doing without.

It's been a difficult realization, but part of me thinks it's about time. A book, if it isn't being read, is really just a thing -- and we all know, I hope, that books when they are being read are so much more than that. By keeping my shelves full of books that I may have read once or twice, but don't see myself reading again, I'm preventing those books from finding other readers more suited to them. I never forget a book I've read, so if I really want to go back and read one of them once they're gone, I can head over to a library; if I come to a point in my life where I need a book again, and I can make it live, then I can always buy it again and support an independent bookstore.

There is nothing wrong with giving books a new life outside of my sagging white bookshelves. I'm in the process of boxing up the books I don't read anymore, and when I'm done they'll get donated to my local library, and when they're there who knows who will find them, and read them?

What I Do With English

Today, I received my BA in English from UC Berkeley. I was selected to speak at the English Department's commencement; this is the speech that I gave.

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When I tell people I’m an English major, the most common response is, “What are you going to do with that?” It’s one of my least favorite questions, but I’ve come to realize that it’s an important one. What are we going to do with English? What have we been doing with it, or in the name of it, in the years we’ve spent as part of Berkeley’s English department?

To most people, all that English majors do is read books, talk about books, and write papers about books. As a result, we don’t seem to be doing very much. But I, for one, value English precisely for its focus on the process of literary analysis. We rarely ask questions that have concrete answers, so our field of study is not defined by the results it produces, but by the practices that help us arrive at our conclusions. No matter what you’re going on to “do” with English, I believe there is value in having learned how to read, how to talk, and how to write like an English major.

English majors read differently from almost every other person I know: we re-read, partly out of necessity, but almost equally out of desire. The second reading is when the words that captivated at the level of story-telling begin to connect to each other across the lines of a poem, or the pages of a novel. Things begin to stand out: a phrase repeated, or not; a pattern, a symbol, a sign. Slowly, something like meaning begins to emerge, simply because we have taken the time to look for it. The pleasure and the danger of this sort of reading is that there is no limit to the number of times that a text can be read. For an English major, reading is never actually finished, only temporarily abandoned, to be reassumed whenever the book is opened again. I think there’s something deeply admirable about this kind of re-reading. After all, a willingness to re-read is also always a willingness to question—and perhaps even counter—first impressions. If English is about the process of re-reading, then it’s also about being continually open to new information, even if that information forces you to change your mind.

The same process of self-questioning is at work when we talk as English majors about the things we read. Looking back on my time spent at Berkeley, it strikes me that so much of my education has been accomplished through informed conversation with professors and with peers, working in tandem to explain, defend, and question our differing perspectives. The purpose of these conversations is not to argue until a single perspective emerges victorious, but rather to strengthen and sharpen all perspectives. In a world increasingly rife with violence that stems from the failure to consider alternate points of view, I believe we need more people who think—and who talk—like English majors. We need more people who are willing to have their opinions swayed by a reasoned discussion, just as we need more communities willing to support this kind of conversation.

As students of English, we’ve learned more than just a specialized vocabulary for talking about the things we read. We’ve learned the importance of continually interrogating our own practices and those of others with the aim of making them better. In the process, we’ve developed the kind of mental flexibility that allows us to think with others, even if we don’t always arrive at an agreement.

So, what are we going to do with that? If you ask me, we’re going to do a lot. Whatever professions we find ourselves pursuing—wherever we live and work, whatever we come to love—we will bring with us a willingness to revise our own assumptions and an openness to the ideas of others. We will model a way of thinking, and ultimately a way of living, that values process over products and individuality over conformity. And we will become integral members of multiple communities, including those that our unique outlook has allowed us to create.

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I might not actually belong to multiple communities yet. But I sure as hell belong to this one:

Alien Appreciation: The Doctor of Doctor Who

There has been an awful lot of Austen on this blog lately, and a regrettable absence of aliens. This post is an attempt to change that.

When I started racking my brain for the last science fiction book I'd read, I realized that it was Jenna Starborn, which sort of doesn't count, since it's also Jane Eyre. But then, before I allowed myself to fall into complete and utter despair, I realized that that might have been the last truly sci-fi book that I read, but it's certainly not my most recent sci-fi media encounter. That title would belong to the absolutely marvelous British television series Doctor Who. Consider this post an appreciation of my current favorite alien, and a not-so-subtle argument about why you should go watch this show as soon as you possibly can.

A lot of people have heard of Doctor Who, but if you're not British (and I'm not), it can't possibly hold the same place in your collective national psyche. The original Doctor Who started running in the sixties, in black and white, and that run didn't end until the mid-eighties. Reruns showed throughout the time when it was off the air, keeping the show as a presence and influencing the lives of generations who might not have been sentient when the show was actually on air. Then, in 2005, the whole thing was rebooted, and the craze kicked off again.

When living in London, I heard a lot about Doctor Who. My friends obsessed over who would be cast as the new Doctor; even my teachers made references to characters from the series, or specific lines and episodes! It was so pervasively cultural that by the time I'd been living there for a couple of months, hanging out with British people and trying to understand what the heck they were saying, I understood a lot about the show without even having watched it.

And then, I watched it. And seriously, wow. Maybe it's because I ran through all of the available episodes of the rebooted series in the course of a month, but that show hit me like a sledgehammer, and a lot of that has to do with the feeling it has, the ambience it creates and how different that is from what I find in so much science fiction--and how much that has to do with the character of the Doctor.

Hard science fiction fans are probably not too satisfied with Doctor Who. The science--which involves a lot of "because we can!" time-and-space travel that isn't even always used consistently within the show's universe (although I'm always far too engrossed to realize this until much later)--isn't really the show's point. The point, as the title might suggest, would be the Doctor. (Tip: his name isn't actually "Doctor Who," and if that phrase is heard, it's usually in response to him introducing himself simply as "the Doctor," which is the only proper name we ever get for him.)

The thing about Doctor Who is that it approaches space, the future, and all of the things you would expect from a science fiction series, with a lot of faith in humanity, even if it is also capable of showing that humanity often doesn't deserve it. The Doctor himself, despite belonging to an alien race called the Time Lords, looks exactly like a human being (although when humans have questioned him about this more than once his answer has been that he doesn't look human, they look Time Lord). But it's more than that. He spends a lot of time on Earth, simply because it seems that he's taken a liking to us--when he says "I'll never stop having to save you," it's equal parts frustration and affection. He believes in the kinds of days when problems are solved without violence--when everybody lives--and he's not the sci-fi hero who goes in with guns blazing. His "weapon" of choice is a sonic screwdriver, and while its powers seems to expand with each new season, most of what it does is open doors! I wholeheartedly agree with Craig Ferguson's sentiment (delivered in song!) that the show represents "the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism," and most of that is down to the continued presence of the Doctor, doing his best to save the worlds one step at a time.

I could go on and on about the Doctor, but nothing that I say about this show will take the place of watching it. So, what are you waiting for -- go watch it! If I haven't quite convinced you, or if you're looking for a little more background before jumping in, you should check out this article, or this excellent infographic. But really, just go and watch it, so that I can dissect future episodes to an audience who knows what I'm talking about!