Apr 02, 2007 16:04
1. Beauty by Robin McKinley
2. The Coelura by Anne McCaffrey
3. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
4. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
5. An Assembly Such As This by Pamela Aidan
6. Duty and Desire by Pamela Aidan
7. These Three Remain by Pamela Aidan
8. A Wizard Alone by Diane Duane
9. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
10. Cameo Diner by Matt Miller
11. A Wizard Abroad by Diane Duane
12. Talking in the Dark by Billy Merrill
13. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tenessee Williams
14. A Thousand Words for Stranger by Julie E. Czerneda
My love affair with literature contines. I just spent a few days (four, I think) with Sira and Morgan and Barac and Huido and Rael (again). I love returning to a book after having spent a long time away from it, especially if it's a book like this one. Though it's not her strongest work in purely literary terms, A Thousand Words for Stranger holds something so true and pure that it's one of my favorite works of hers, making it one of my favorite books, period.
There are some books to which I return in times of turmoil; indeed, books are often stabilizing elements in my life. But they also sometimes "affect me like disaster," as Kafka would have it -- "take us away from all that we love, take us into forests far from ourselves... The book must be the axe to the frozen sea within us." It's comfort yet excitement, every single time. I don't even know how many times I've read Stranger now -- three? Four? And it's still just as good as the first time, though every time it is different, every time a different sentence rings out somehow truer. Every part is a good part. I don't even know what to say, but I feel like i have to keep talking about the books, to try to get someone else to read them -- they're that good, at least for me.
I remember the first time I read it. It was freshman year, just past my birthday, because Katherine gave me my copy as a birthday present. It was a school day, and I was reading. We were watching a video in Bio, and Mr. Carnes liked me so when I asked if I could sit in the back room and read, he let me. I read through all my classes -- I've a knack for doing that. Then it came to Spanish, where I never paid attention, and was reading until almost the end of the period when Mr. Salgado finally got angry with me for not paying attention and took the book away. I didn't get it back until the next day, and believe me, the time spent without it was torture. But it returned, and I returned to it, and it was good. Come to think of it, it was the book that started my habit of tabbing with sticky notes my favorite scenes, so that I could more easily access them at a later date. Now I tab anything I know I'll want to read again, and the spine of my book is creased so that it will naturally favor opening to one of those marked pages.
I need to stop talking about this right now and begin to work on my homework, but the love of good literature is so overpowering, at least in me, and so sometimes I just need to talk about it.
julie e. czerneda,
books