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.