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.