I have always imagined paradise to be a kind of library.
-Jorge Luis Borges
There are times when I miss academic life. Not the teaching so much, though I do miss that, but the excuse to focus so thoroughly on stories and the ideas contained in them and the ready group of fellow-travellers hanging around the halls in the department. I've been reading Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books off and on for the last couple of months and beneath the political horror of the regime in Iran that she describes is her obvious deep pleasure in books and in engaging her students with them: teasing their minds open, helping them make connections between the actions of the characters and human nature, and to see what the authors have to say about the human condition. I miss that part of talking about books with people who are not just well-read, but who understand the underpinnings of the art, the history of the authors, and the social context in which they wrote. I miss being able to talk about what stories mean, not just individually, but collectively as an art form, what shape(s) an author's collected works show/s to the world in retrospect and how they fit into the larger collection of works we consider canon—or don't consider canon. I like thinking about books themselves as objects, too: incunabula, hand copied and illustrated and bound medieval manuscripts, hand-typeset letterpress books like those from Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press. The physical act of opening a book is like opening the shutters on a window that never reveals the same view twice, not even for the same person. In this sense, they are also a mirror reflecting the person who comes to them and all that they bring with them. Like so many other important activities in life, you get out of books what you put into them.
Stories, for me, are like the proverbial river you can't step into twice. This is why I read the ones I've been most attracted to more than once. I like to revisit them sometimes years later to see what I get out of them this time around. Inevitably, I'm a different person than I was when I first sat down to read a particular story, even if it was only a few months before. Sometimes I find, as I did with A.S. Byatt's Possession, that I'm so different that the book isn't relevant or enjoyable anymore, even if I was riveted enough to read it in one go the first time around.
There are a few books I love that I'm a little afraid to go back to for this reason, though I keep them around anyway: Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, for instance. I read it when it was first published, in hardcover (when I couldn't afford hardcovers) and I can honestly say his description of Grand Central Station was one of the factors that tipped the scales from Evanston to NYU for my choice of graduate schools. Well, that and Evanston was a dry town. I met Helprin several years later at an ABA convention when he was signing A Soldier of the Great War and told him that Winter's Tale was one of the reasons I'd moved to New York City. By that time, he'd moved from the Hudson Valley to Seattle and looked at me with a literal mixture of horror and pity that I'd thought only existed as an authorial device. "I'm so sorry!" he said with all sincerity. I wasn't. Grand Central was every bit as magical as he'd made me imagine it to be, whether a boy named Peter Lake had ever lived in the barrel vaults behind it or not, even if I didn't discover how very green it was until it was refurbished. I'd seen the city under the coat of snow Helprin described, one that made it as quiet as it sounded in his book.
There are books that only get better and better the more you read them. I've read Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast about a dozen times since it was originally published in an illustrated trade paperback now completely dismembered by use. It's not considered to be his best or his most famous book, but it's one of the shortlist of My Favorite Books. I read it first during my opening year of graduate school, and it repaid my further diligence by slowly revealing both geeky and intellectual in-jokes and references as I got older and more well-read myself. It was twice the fun when I knew who Pauli and Neutra and Turing were, and when I'd read more of the stories he not just alludes to but recreates during the course of his protagonists' journey through parallel universes. I think it was highly underrated and consider it one of my secret finds. I know it's really good, even if nobody else gets it.
I also go back to books I had to read in college because, somehow, reading something because I have to always makes the task onerous and the book odious. There are two exceptions to this general rule, and I was sick as a dog when I read both of them so I'm not sure they count, given my state of mind and drug ingestion. I've read Spenser's Faerie Queen twice, believe it or not, once for a class in graduate school, once when I was long out of school, and both times under the influence of fog-inducing antihistamines. I loved it both times and have come to the conclusion that even a hard-core medievalist (yes, I know it's a Renaissance tome) needs to be somewhat stoned to really enjoy the experience. Whitman reads best in this state, too, I think, when his poems become somewhat incantatory. I read Virginia Woolf's The Waves in the same state, not drugged but fevered as Woolf herself often was, and have very pleasant memories of lying in bed with hot tea and her book and thinking it was the most beautiful, poetic prose I'd ever read, nearly swooning with pleasure. I'm a little afraid to go back to that one, too. We all must preserve our illusions.
Then there are the books that I go back to over and over again when I'm too tired or too sick to engage with something new (a habit one of Heinlein's characters also refers to in Number of the Beast). I used to read Lord of the Rings every year in the spring, and have worn out not one but three sets of books doing it: two paperback sets and the hardcovers. I'm looking forward to replacing the latter with that big red faux tooled leather volume with all the gold leaf on it. There was always a certain sensation associated with reading Tolkien in the spring that I can't really describe, but the book seemed to belong to that season. I couldn't imagine reading it at any other time of year. I think the return to the Shire at the end of it reminded me of the wet smell of spring and the relief and pleasure I always got from my first long bike ride at the end of winter when there were still patches of snow on the ground and a bit of ice along the road but also patches of hardy spring flowers pushing up through what was left of the once-six-foot-deep drifts in the woods.
I read Spider Robinson's Callahan books when I need a good laugh. They are full of abominable puns and one or two truly funny situations before which I am helpless with mirth, no matter how many times I read them. They're comfort books in the best sense. Cunning, anarchy, and a sense of humor inevitably triumph over humorless and evil bureaucrats of all species. Laurell Hamilton's Anita Blake series are comfort books in a totally different way: they're bloody and gory and people die abominably in them, but Anita always makes the killers pay, although never without some cost to herself. Anita and I understand each other.
My comfort reading tends to be potboilers, but those aren't, by and large, the books that really stick in my head, that were somehow life-changing, like Helprin's book. Those are books like James Leo Herlihy's Season of the Witch, that made me want to live in New York when I was only 11 years old; Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which turned me on to science fiction and fantasy; Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy, which sparked my interest in medieval history and literature and Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, which made me decide to specialize in it in college; Virginia Woolf's diaries, which got me both interested in Bloomsbury and in printing and publishing; Isaac Asimov's science writing, which turned me into a geek.
This is not the same as the books that have taught me as a writer: Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, which introduced me to the concept of antiheroes; Ursula LeGuin, Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Robertson Davies, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon who all taught me about magical realism and experimental lit; Chaucer, who taught me about joyous ribaldry; Carolyn Forche, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, the Beowulf poet, and Seamus Heaney, who taught me about the language of poetry. These are all authors I read for plot and language and craft, as well as for enjoyment. There are a lot more, but who can ever trace all their influences?
And it's not nearly as interesting to talk about influences as it is to just talk about books—about stories, really—and sometimes teach them. The influences aren't necessarily emotional in the same way the stories are. I wouldn't say that James Baldwin's story "Sonny's Blues" influenced me as a writer, but it's one of those powerful stories that sticks with me, years after I've read it and taught it and loved teaching it, because it's so true. It's true emotionally, socially, politically—whether you think it's about making art, family relationships, racism, social climbing, drug abuse, poverty, or music—in a way only fiction can be. This is the place F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jane Austen and Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov occupy for Azar Nafisi, and one of the reasons I'm enjoying her book so much. She feels like a kindred soul to me, in her love of literature, no matter that our experiences of life are so different, and that we grew up half a world away from each other.
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