Infinitely Re-Read
The fine fellows over at SfSignal ask the musical question:
There are books we read once. There are books we re-read. And then there are the books that we wear out our copy because we devour it again and again. The books we have to buy a copy for ourselves immediately upon lending out our copy because we’re sure we will never see it again–or just want to make sure we have it on hand. What are some of these genre books for you? Why do you go back to them again and again?
My answer: The primary purpose of nonfiction books is either to give us facts, give us insights based on facts, or to persuade or urge us into some course of action based on that insight. But the primary purpose of fiction is to slake the thirst we have for the magical waters which flow from worlds beyond the dry and bitter world of facts, to drink, to bathe, to be cleansed, to be refreshed, and to emerge shining from the baptism of the imagination to return to the dry wasteland of the factual world washed and prepared for battle. Science fiction and Fantasy form the deeper waters which carry us farther from the shore of this wasteland, and therefore provide deeper springs from which, through the imagination, to irrigate it.
Hence, those books which call a reader again and again to its wellsprings must be those which have particular power to restore what the factual world does not give him. By seeing what books never lose the power to refresh him, you can see what he most craves and yet which the world most fails to provide him.
You can see the rest of answer, and the answer of writers no doubt more insightful than I, by clicking the link: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014/05/mind-meld-books-weve-worn-out-re-reading/
It is perhaps the longest Mind Meld ever, and if you are looking for something new to read, you could do worse than finding out what your favorite authors’ favorite books are.
It is with grave sorrow that I see how few of these favorite books I have read or even heard about. In my youth, I read two books a day, and the field was small enough that an avid reader (and none was more avid than I) could be familiar with all the major and most of the minor works. These days, I have little time to read for pleasure, and what pleases me has narrowed, and so even bestsellers and awardwinners are strangers to me.
I am pleased to see authors praising Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE and Susan Cooper’s THE DARK IS RISING. In addition to being good books, both have arresting titles that catch the eye from even across the room. (Speaking of good titles, Laura Resnick has a brilliant one: MISFORTUNE COOKIE. Is that not a title that makes one’s eye simply water with desire to read the book? I have no idea what the book is about, but that title hooked my curiosity.)
It is a topic for another article, or perhaps for another Mind Meld, but what titles strike you as the most evocative, the best able to pique one’s curiosity? My vote for this category would be THE DYING EARTH by Jack Vance and THE WELL AT THE WORLD’S END by William Morris. The first, with merely two words almost never seen in conjunction (Animals and man die, or even nations, but the Earth?) and this immediately evokes a sense of peculiar desolation akin to awe. It promises a sense of wonder.
As for the second, if you cannot see the sheer magic in a title like THE WELL AT THE WORLD’S END, then you are no true traveler of Elfin Lands, nor ever sailed the haunted seas beyond the twilight.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
