Sometimes a book comes into your life at just the right moment. There’s something in it that speaks to your specific place in space and time, like the heavens aligning for an eclipse.
I spent my 16th year as an exchange student in France, living with a French family, attending a French school, and being completely immersed in the language—which I barely spoke a word of when I arrived. Even though I was an obsessive reader, I left my books at home. The whole point, I’d reasoned, was to forsake English for a year while I learned a different language. I rapidly realized my mistake—I was forlorn without books that I could understand.
So I wrote a letter to my Great Aunt Joan. In my reading life, my Aunt Joan was the Gandalf to my Frodo, the Merlin to my Arthur. She was responsible for most of the great literary loves of my childhood: the Moomins, Oz, the Dark is Rising series—all of them came from her. I wrote to her and I told her how forsaken I felt without any books that spoke to my heart.
Weeks later, I received a brown paper envelope with a note and a book inside. The note said, “This doesn’t have any dragons, but I think it may do the trick.” The book was her battered copy of Engine Summer by John Crowley.
Engine Summer takes place in a distant future, where the world has changed utterly from the one we know into something stranger and more mystical. Little hints and whispers are all that remain of the world as we know it. It tells the story of Rush that Speaks as he journeys in search of the woman he loves, as well as the truth about the mysterious saints and angels who have captured his imagination.
If you look up reviews of this book, you will find that they all mention its strangeness. Reading it is a little bit like trying to learn the layout of a room by looking at it through a kaleidoscope. It’s like a series of boxes folded inside one another, only instead of boxes they are cats, and instead of folding they are running around underneath a thick quilt.
When you dive head-first into learning a foreign language abroad, every sentence becomes a riddle. With every word you must interpret—not just the literal meaning of that word, but how it relates to all the others around it, and how they in turn relate to the culture and perspective of the person speaking them. Every day I felt like a failing detective, trying to untangle mysteries just so I could eat, sleep, and go about my obligations. I felt stupid all the time.
There could have been no more perfect moment to hand me the enigma of Engine Summer. Each page of the book dared me to look deeper, to peel back the layers and work to understand the true meaning that lay beneath. But this mystery – unlike those that left me exhausted and confused every hour of the day—this mystery was in my language. This was a riddle I could solve.
I set about it, writing up my theories. I was desperate for someone to discuss it with immediately, so in what might be my most nerdy moment ever, I wrote an elaborate analytical essay about the book’s symbolism and turned it in to my French literature professor, even though she had not asked for an essay and had never read the book. She returned it covered in a lot of red question marks.
I read the book about ten more times that year. I haven’t read it since. I know that it could not be the same.
My next fated book encounter happened several years later.
The summer after I graduated from college, I worked as a shepherdess on a farm in Maine. I was living in a tiny cabin that didn’t have electricity or plumbing, but did have a loom and a spinning wheel, spending my days tending to sheep and gardening. Almost all of my belongings had already made their way home without me, including my books, so I decided to indulge in what was undoubtedly the longest fantasy novel released that year: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. My copy arrived by mail, and I remember walking through the fields and out to my cabin that night, clutching it happily to my chest.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell tells the story of two nineteenth-century magicians who revive the art of magic in England, becoming celebrities and entangling themselves in warfare, politics, and dark, mystical forces.
Every night, after the sheep were safely pastured and all the chores were done, I would make my way home, climb up into the loft, light my candles, and get lost in Clarke’s world of English magic. The wind in the trees, the shuffling of the horse pastured not far from my door, and the flickering of candles entwined seamlessly with the otherworldly mystery of the novel. Sometimes it almost felt as though I had been transported to that older, stranger time.
I’ve tried several times since to reread it. I want to laugh at its clever footnotes and appreciate its nuanced characters with an older eye. But every time I open it, I miss the golden candlelight and the scratch of pine branches against my darkened window. My experience of it was not the sum of its beautiful and clever words printed in black ink upon the page, but something richer. It is impossible to go again through that particular portal to Faerie.
And that is both the beauty and tragedy of the right book for the right time. It can save you, and transport you—but like those who grow too old for Narnia, there can be no going back again.
Top image by Stewart Butterfield.
Caitlyn Paxson is a writer and storyteller. She is an editor at Goblin Fruit, and can sometimes be found discussing folklore and pop culture on the Fakelore Podcast or performing with the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours.
Your first sentence started an echo from “Wicked” running through my head:
“I’ve heard it said / that books will come into our lives for a reason / bringing something we must learn…”
Nice piece, leading me to reflect on some pivotal books and times.
As I read this, I was trying to think of a book that I had that experience with.. I struggled a bit because I was going about it the wrong way. But as the reading of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was discribed, I immediately knew.
Mine was the first of the Thieves’ World books, self titled Thieves’ World. My apartment was in a bad area or ghetto, and then Hurricane Hugo hit and knocked out power. Reading by candlelight, -sometimes even jury-rigged candles because I didn’t own more than one or two real candles- that book just came to life. Between the storm putting me into what felt like the Dark Ages, and the creeps of living where gang and criminal activity occurs daily, put me to feeling the desperation that most the citizens of Sanctuary had in common.
And even though this isn’t exactly same thing, but how awesome is it when you’re immersed into great reading adventure and something happens in your surroundings that is totally in-sync with what you’re reading? Like the one time I was reading Gunman’s Rhapsody by Robert Parker. It was a book about Wyatt Erp and his brothers; I was reading at my desk during the lunch hour in a nearly deserted cubical farm about a gunfight about to happen at a railroad station, when a train whistle blew. At the time I’d forgotten there was even tracks close-by, so it was if some ghosts from the Old West just reached out to grab me. It was AWESOME!
Fourth grade, 9yo me, reading instructor gives me a choice between Lord of the Flies and The Hobbit. Knowing nothing about either, I picked up The Hobbit – a chance meeting, as they say. And as Spider Robinson once put it, bam my life was changed.
Once upon a time, I was searching through a missionary barrel for something to do. It was a quite literal barrel, owned by quite literal missionaries, and I was as bored as a preteen in the middle of the jungle with nothing to do but stare at grass can be bored, having exhausted every book in the tiny library of the missionary school. But the barrel was being used for storage, of old toys and such, and I was desperate enough that even a new-to-me stuffed animal would’ve been some amusement.
What I pulled out of the barrel was Diane Duane’s Door Into Fire, in which a man goes off questing with at least one cheery female friend to help his on and off boyfriend, a feckless prince, and meets along the way a magical horse made of fire who falls passionately in love with him. And there in a storage room of an old house on a missionary compound, I suddenly fell into a world where not only did same-sex attraction exist, but it was spoken of casually and amiably as something that anyone might enjoy, and no one would think poorly of. Wrapped up in fantasy that I loved, and presented as a fait accompli: so the world is, and why shouldn’t it be that way?
The right book, at the right time. I’ve never reread the book since: I don’t think it could possibly stand up to what it did for me in that breathless afternoon where I sat on the floor and read the whole thing in one sitting, with the afternoon light through the window growing dim and dusty around me.
I’ve never been able to forget the end of Engine Summer – their last sight of the narrator walking away, out of their lives forever after. It was an excellent metaphor for how we feel about any fictional character to whom we become attached. Once the book is over, they’re gone, and there’s no way of knowing what happened to them over the remainder of their lives. Nonsense, of course – fictional characters don’t have lives beyond the end of their books. But Crowley caught very well what a reader may feel about a well-fleshed, engaging character after they’ve put the book down.
Mine is Taliesin, Merlin and Arthur books by Stephen Lawhead. I got the books for Christmas, I was in the spare room as mine was being redecorated, sitting on a mattress on the floor eating (chocolate) gold coins smelling paint from next door, I was lost in the world. It didn’t retain the magic as strongly when I read it again. I’m not sure anything could.
Another is Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand, read book, dumped boyfriend so I could get back to the book.
What a wonderful argument against re-reading! lol. But seriously, reading a book often does have a lot to do with right place, right time. And a good book, one you really got lost in, almost inevitably gets muddled together with the memory of where you were (and who you were) when you read it. Trying to return to it, you may be duelling with the suck fairy and potentially dirtying the clear memory of that magic connection you had with it. Don’t spoil it, I say. Better to go in search of new magic (and let it happen) rather than revisit old magic (and try forcing it to happen again).
I vividly remember when my father gave me his old copy of Robert Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. It is inextricably woven together with that young time in my life. It helped that the protagonist was young and having escapist adventures just like I wanted to. It is not the same experience reading it now.
That change of perspective doesn’t make me sad though, wistful perhaps. One can never exactly recreate the experience of reading a book for the first time. Once you’ve gone through it, any reread is a different adventure. There are books that I read over and over again and enjoy the transformation of perspective. Often I find myself strongly identifying with a different character or finding a scene extremely powerful that I never felt so strongly about before. There are books that I reread on a regular basis and that ritual has taken on its own life to me.
In many ways, this is why I love a book store, new or used. The serendipity of receiving a book as a gift is magic and there is something special about stumbling across a book while browsing that simply captures you because of its cover, the summary or because you just need something to read. I’ve found some books during a random browse that I might never have otherwise discovered. There is a book store called Uncle Hugo’s in my hometown that has become that place for me a number of times. I came across an old copy of the Witches of Karres in their used book section as a teenager and was never the same again. When I worked in another bookshop I found so many things randomly because I was simply around shelves of books all the time. There are so many treasures to be found.
I have literally been your first paragraph. 16, in France, thinking that I was being a good language learner by leaving my books at home, completely ignoring my identity as a reader as well as a learner.
Seventh grade, 12 yo, first season of Star Trek just starting, I find Starship Troopers by Heinlein; what a game-changer, equal to “getting” the Beatles and Hendrix. Multiple reads, bought multiple copies and gave them away like some sort of prosyletizer, and I still enjoy the damn thing! Then The World According to Garp as a young adult and a new world opened, never enough Irving which lead to a re-appreciation of Dickens.
I believe in this. I found Pawn of Prophecy at a Goodwill store, and a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea in a park.
Willey’s A Sorcerer and a Gentleman. Once you’ve read it you can go back and see how all the pieces fit into the denouement — but on first reading it’s one big nobody-is-a-villain-in-their-own-mind pool you’re trying to find direction in. Normally I like things clearer from the start — too often a muddle simply means the writer handwaved over the hard parts instead of finishing them — but this was fascinating.
Beautiful article, thank you for sharing! And so true. While reading it, and then speaking of “Each page of the book dared me to look deeper, to peel back the layers and work to understand the true meaning that lay beneath” I couldn’t help but think about The Wars of Light and Shadow, a series which came into my life exactly at the right moment, when I was having a troubled time at work, so lots of downtime and even more uncertainty. The beauty of the epic, and the necessity to focus helped me a great deal during those months. Not to mention, influencing my current tastes in fantasy….I thought “epic” meant stories similar to tLofR, so I avoided it, and I’m happy I’ve realized my mistake, so I’ve to thank that series not only for the time I spent with it, but for the great reads I picked afterwards.