(no subject)

[rushthatspeaks]

Temp job over (by a couple of days). Nearly recovered. sovay came for dinner last night, which was great.

So lo, I have the energy for an entry containing content.

I noticed that mentally, I tend to separate book-related experiences into two categories: there are the favorite books, the ones where the content of the book is an experience that grows and deepens with every repetition, and then there are the favorite readings, the times when the place one is reading and the things going on around one and the content of the book combine to make a particular moment, a memory which colors the book on later readings, a circumstance which can never be duplicated. Over the years, I've talked a lot about my favorite books (in fact, the difficulty can be in getting me to stop). But I actually can't recall the last time I talked about my favorite readings, even though they can be fairly instrumental in creating my favorite books.



These are in roughly chronological order.

-- My parents learned when I was very small that there was one infallible way of getting me to stop crying, no matter how uncomfortable I was: read to me, and I'd forget everything else. Consequently, they developed a habit of reading to me by the hour, which didn't wear off when I reached the age of being able to read by myself. They went through every children's book they could think of and moved on to their own favorites, which is why, at the age of eight or nine, my parents started me on The Fellowship of the Ring. Unfortunately, I was an extremely suggestible child with far-ranging night fears, and by the time we reached Weathertop, I'd started waking up screaming, which disturbed the entire household. Citing my ever-worsening nightmares, my parents cut out the reading entirely somewhere during Moria, and forbade me to go near the book until I was older.

They made one crucial mistake: I didn't know what happened next. My nightmares didn't go away. I didn't believe it was going to be all right, and it mattered. Oh, did it matter.

My classroom at school had a small library shelf in the back, full of donations and used books and things without covers. There was a three-volume set of The Lord of the Rings. I made it through Fellowship and into The Two Towers before somebody noticed and the books were taken away from me.

Obviously, I had to resort to desperate measures. I had a friend who was willing to bring her parents' copy in to school. The question was how to read it. I couldn't take it home, and my teachers had developed an eagle eye. It was going to require a very careful set of arrangements.

There was a supply closet just outside my classroom, which nobody ever really used, because it was full of relics from the days of our school building as a traditional Catholic school attached to the church next door. The church didn't want to throw out its spare rosaries and breviaries, but didn't have anywhere to keep them. It was a large closet, and technically a lit closet, but the bulb had burned out probably a generation previously and was never quite replaced. The door was not kept locked because nothing inside was thought to be of value and the students were considered too young to use it for any truly nefarious purposes (oddly enough an accurate assessment as far as I know). And one of the shelves had space on it for the Lord of the Rings omnibus.

Whenever a research project had been assigned, students were allowed to go down to the school library at the other end of the building to use a wider selection of books and computers. We could go whenever we had free time, so the librarian wasn't expecting us. I rationed myself carefully: fifty pages per library trip, half beforehand and half afterwards. I read very quickly, but I didn't want anyone to notice I was missing.

It took months. When I think about Tolkien, there I am back in the supply closet, pressed against the wall on the left-hand side of the door, door carefully pulled inward just an inch so that the light from the hallway shone on the pages of the book, mysterious dusty darkness a foot away from my nose and my shoulders tightening every time someone walked by outside. It was wonderful.

As soon as I'd finished the book, my nightmares about it stopped. Ha. I still have an urge to hide behind something every time I read Tolkien. It's an urge I generally give in to, though I don't go so far as to read him in closets.

-- The first time I ever read H.P. Lovecraft, at twelve or so, I was in an old bookstore in one of the malls that my parents and I used to go to for dinner after various activities. I always ate fast and scrambled off to look at the fantasy section. It was the first non-chain bookstore I can ever recall being in, and it had a well-selected and well-curated wall of highlights of the genre. I was reading an anthology of early high and dark fantasy (I don't remember which one) and had just finished my first Dunsany, 'The Fortress Unvanquishable Save For Sacnoth', which made me shiver with delight. The next story was Lovecraft's 'The Rats in the Walls'. I started to tremble as I crouched there in the aisle, staring out at the fluorescent-lighted mall walkway full of people talking and laughing and chattering and unaware that any moment now their reality was going to peel away like a sticker and reveal... something. Something... else. I waited impatiently for the ending, expecting it all to come right again, and of course it didn't. I vowed never to read Lovecraft again. He was just too nasty. Within two years, I would be compiling material for an amateur biography, bibliography, and comparison of Lovecraft with Dunsany, which is still a project I would not mind going back to.

-- We had family friends who had a house within two blocks of ours. They had a large yard, with a stream at the bottom of it, and a genuine mulberry bush, and a treehouse, and a weathered and creaking deck. The entire house was weathered and creaking, old wood soaked in sunlight and dust, and it was full of souvenirs of the many, many places they'd traveled to: African masks and nets and fishing spears, Indian musical instruments, stones picked up in rivers in South America, and nameless unidentifiable objects that nobody could quite recall. The doors of their house were always open. I'd drift in and out irregardless of the family's presence or absence, sometimes meeting one of their sons to play in the treehouse, sometimes talking with one of the parents, sometimes berrying in the raspberry canes by the stream.

The house had a basement, which had only one finished room, containing a television (the only one they had, and often turned to the wall) and a wrestling mat. The rest of the basement had been the haunt of the family's two grown-up daughters, and had been scheduled for renovation when they went off to college. The renovation was started but never completed, and I wasn't really supposed to go into the unfinished part of the basement, because no one could remember if there was exposed wiring. There was a door to the outside in the basement, though, across the unfinished part, and, like all the doors in the house, it often stood open, even if it was never used. It led into a small stand of trees.

I forget why I decided to explore the unfinished part of the basement on a bright summer afternoon when I was possibly thirteen. Probably I was tired of being outside and no one was home. I do remember climbing over the tumble-down, half-ruined sofa that blocked the remains of the hallway, and plunging up to my elbows in the piles of things abandoned by the household and the daughters. There was plaster dust and piled paper, curious splintered blocks of wood and spills of sticky paint, fishing spears and the works of an old marionette, and all of it drowned in the drifts of dead leaves spilling in through the open, swinging door and swirled by the warm summer wind. It was a dry decay, not gone to mold and slime, and the faint rustlings in the shadows proved to be squirrels and not insects: caches of nuts in the old sofa cushions. There was a candle and matches. I lit it. Half the space (you couldn't call it a room, since it was several rooms spilled into each other, the walls partway down and crumbling) was flickering firelight and the other half the fierce hot light of August.

I found a pile of books in an old African fishing net, tied together with ribbon. There were two large art books on the outside, the top one so encrusted with dried slime and so water-stained that I could not figure out what it had been. The bottom one was Brian Froud's book The Goblins of Labyrinth, in its first printing, eaten by moths and mold until it had faded into pictures of half-rotted tapestries, text swimming out of the pages only partly readable. It was beautiful. In between the two art books was the paperback they had protected, still as fresh as the day it was purchased and not even slightly musty. I shook the ribbon until it fell out into my hand.

Moonwise, by Greer Ilene Gilman.

I came to myself again when the light was leaving me, my candle near burned out and sunset showing through the trees. I tied the book into the packet again, where I had found it, and heaped the net back over with the leaves I'd been digging through. I went out the basement door, the only time I ever used it, and found myself singing as I walked home, and dropping pebbles in the stream as I went over the footbridge. I was not quite late for dinner.

From that day to this, if you ask me to define magic, I will try to give you a room tangled in wiring, squirrels nesting in the baseboards, and old forgotten autumns piled over unsuspected treasures; I will try to give you candlelight in the sun and a wreath of dust over the lintel. I will try to give you oak leaves pressed dry by Brian Froud paintings. I will try to give you African fishing spears and stone-throwers and baskets, and a pile of working top-line art markers broken and staining the flooring. I will try to give you wood and dry heat, and a house where the doors are always open.

Mostly, I'll lend you Moonwise, which is really sufficient.



What are other people's favorite readings?