I’m teaching a course this term called Fantasy, Myth, and Language, and I’m enjoying it so much; it’s the first time I’ve designed a course completely from scratch (previous syllabi have usually had some inheritance of other profs’ structure/content) and filled it with a (small, undergrad-oriented) fraction of things I like to talk about.
One of the first things I got them to read was Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist, a 1926 novel about, among other things, the deleterious effects of fairy fruit—and in re-reading it, I found I remembered almost nothing about its plot, only how it had made me feel. That feeling had been, at the time—when I was 19—uncomfortable, unwelcome, sometimes frustrating; now, re-reading it, I felt warmed by melting sympathy with the protagonist’s anxious state of mind, his coping mechanisms for being haunted by a strangeness that unsettled his youth.
I’m going to write much more about this, either on the other side of the move or by means of procrastinating against its realities, but for now—tell me about a book you returned to and found, to your surprise, a much better book than you remembered.
Moby-dick, of all things, is this book for me. I first read it my freshman year of college, and slogged through it because it was on the syllabus (if I recall correctly, I argued with my professor to let me bring the book Ahab's Wife into my final paper because I wanted to write about how there were no women in the book. extremely on brand, 18-year-old Suz). I then had to read it again for a different course three years later, and found myself utterly taken with it--the language, the structure, the queerness, the call of the sea and the whale himself. I still count it now as one of my favorites.
(Ironically, applying my current memory to Ahab's Wife, I think I would find it wanting if I read again. We'll see if I ever have the time/wherewithal to revisit it).
The Silmarillion was this for me. I first picked it up as part of a six Tolkien-books box set at a book sale when I was 12, and got thoroughly bored when I tried reading it after having ploughed through the other ones. Then, about six or seven years later when word about the LotR movie trilogy started to show up in the newspapers (wow, it's really been a while since they made those films) I decided to give it another go and discovered that I really enjoyed the prose I'd remembered as too dense and stodgy. That now the pages almost turned by themselves as I mauled through it like an 8-year-old who's just been given their first Enid Blyton mystery novel.
A Local Habitation by Seanan McGuire - first time round I found the mystery to be fairly obvious and telegraphed; second time through I'd got more invested in the characters having read the rest of the series, and I enjoyed their dynamic a lot more.
These days I'm always just relieved when books are as good as I remembered and haven't been blessed by the Suck Fairy. If I didn't like a book, I'm unlikely to give it another try, but this thread is making me rethink that.
This year, I’ve been re-reading the Tale of Genji as part of a book club that stemmed from Genji being so influential and showing up in a number of novels we were reading. We’ve been doing 5 chapters a month, and it’s been going pretty well. Having your mind a thousand years ago is actually pretty good right now.
I think if you’d asked me whether I’d ever read Genji again after my second read of it around age 25, I’d have said no. It’s important to have read it as a Japan lit person, but twice was more than enough. But I’m actually really enjoying it this time. I’m reading the Washburn translation this time, and it’s much easier going that the Tyler translation was. But also, I think having it be a group of friends reading together rather than a class, and the additional age to appreciate some of the characters more, really has made a difference. It still has a lot of issues because that society has a lot of issues, but it’s been a balm to read, for the most part, which is more than I’d expected. ^_^
When I was but a lad, I was deeply invested in the Battletech expanded universe novels, and a recent search for comfort reading led me back in search of something unchallenging. To my surprise, Michael Charette's "Wolves on the Border" offers a rather more nuanced approach to questions of honour, duty and the boundaries of friendship than I recalled (or indeed, than one might imagine from a novel that is, on the face of it, about men in ridiculous giant robots kicking the absolute snot out of each other).
I wonder how much else is buried in what we can often dismiss as "just" tie-in fiction for various franchises?
My childhood love, Swallows & Amazons, turns out to be just as good on adult reading (maybe better because I remember the childhood reading as well). It's feminist before its time, and the adult characters turn out to be almost as interesting and nuanced as the child characters.
Ancillary Justice is one of my favorite books ever, but I had to put it down and come back to it. The pronouns made it very difficult for me to envision characters. So much of the short-hand of whoa person is comes down to gender. Once I got past that, it was a wonderfully engaging read.
Lord of the Rings. I've failed to finish rereading it for 30-odd years. If they were lucky, I left the hobbits at Rivendell, but the barrow wights got them once! But Philip Reeve blogged his reread over the summer (https://philipreeveblog.blogspot.com) and it spurred me on. It was immensely satisfying to come back to: so much forgotten; so many good memories.
On the other I hand, I tried to reread Jude the Obscure some years back. I had been my favourite Hardy. Hated it so, so much.
Oh my gosh, I LOVE Lud-in-the-Mist! In terms of books I've returned to, I disliked the stories of Borges the first time I read them. They just seemed weirdly basic. Then a couple years later I came back and was floored. They only seemed basic because of how elemental their power is.
God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert. In my youth of osmosing anything SFF that came my way, I plowed through the Dune series. On the first reading, this fourth book of the series was an *amazing* slog. It’s my first memory of outright stalling on a book, needing a few tries to “get over the hill” and roll on through it and the rest of the series. On a reread many years later, I read it voraciously. In retrospect, I think I simply needed a (much) more adult mind to really appreciate that book’s storytelling.
My Sweet Orange Tree by José Mauro de Vasconcelos. It's one of those books that all children in Turkey read. I remember loving it when I was a kid, Zezé and his misadventures... When I read it again a few years ago, well... It was certainly a different experience, but a good one still. As a kid, I somehow didn't see all the sadness and neglect and poverty for what it was. I fell for Vasconcelos's storytelling. He tricked the kid-me. As an adult, I found depth and tenderness. And so much longing...for a better life, for joy, friendship, love, for all those things everyone wants and deserves as a child.
I had resisted reading Tuck Everlasting as a kid - owned it, went, ugh, another annoying magical kid who will pressure sensible girls into doing irresponsible things. I don't know what made me finally pick it up and read it a few years ago, but I was blown away by how sweet and vivid and powerfully written it is.
Mythago Wood. I probably first read it about 40 yrs ago. I don’t remember much about the experience except I found it difficult, but for some reason, I kept it and re-read it recently. It is an extraordinary book, eldritch and compelling; it’s evocation of the numinous and liminal is a wonder
A book I have new appreciation for is A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I didn't care for it that much when I read it the first time, at 9, and I certainly still have some issues with its Christian focus (in a way I don't with Wind in the Door, so odd). That said, when reading recently I found a lot to love. In particular, I adore how L'Engle saw and called out the West's wasteful ways and its super-narrow perspective.
Not a book, but when I first read Thornton Wilder's Our Town in my early 20s, it left me cold - but then when I re-read it years later before seeing a production, it left me in tears. Yes, I acknowledge the observations that it's not a universal story in many respects, but I still found it to be powerful in its embrace of the ordinary moments of life.
Took me three attempts to finish Gaiman's American Gods. I gave up on it two times thinking it was too dense for me. But then I went back to it at a time when my attention was not so fragmented because of social media and found it worth the time and effort. It was wondrous that time.
Oh wow, that course sounds GREAT.
Moby-dick, of all things, is this book for me. I first read it my freshman year of college, and slogged through it because it was on the syllabus (if I recall correctly, I argued with my professor to let me bring the book Ahab's Wife into my final paper because I wanted to write about how there were no women in the book. extremely on brand, 18-year-old Suz). I then had to read it again for a different course three years later, and found myself utterly taken with it--the language, the structure, the queerness, the call of the sea and the whale himself. I still count it now as one of my favorites.
(Ironically, applying my current memory to Ahab's Wife, I think I would find it wanting if I read again. We'll see if I ever have the time/wherewithal to revisit it).
The Silmarillion was this for me. I first picked it up as part of a six Tolkien-books box set at a book sale when I was 12, and got thoroughly bored when I tried reading it after having ploughed through the other ones. Then, about six or seven years later when word about the LotR movie trilogy started to show up in the newspapers (wow, it's really been a while since they made those films) I decided to give it another go and discovered that I really enjoyed the prose I'd remembered as too dense and stodgy. That now the pages almost turned by themselves as I mauled through it like an 8-year-old who's just been given their first Enid Blyton mystery novel.
A Local Habitation by Seanan McGuire - first time round I found the mystery to be fairly obvious and telegraphed; second time through I'd got more invested in the characters having read the rest of the series, and I enjoyed their dynamic a lot more.
By the way, Glasgow has a new mural of St Theneu - here she is... https://www.scottishhousingnews.com/article/thenue-housing-mural-takes-shape-in-glasgow-s-east-end
These days I'm always just relieved when books are as good as I remembered and haven't been blessed by the Suck Fairy. If I didn't like a book, I'm unlikely to give it another try, but this thread is making me rethink that.
This year, I’ve been re-reading the Tale of Genji as part of a book club that stemmed from Genji being so influential and showing up in a number of novels we were reading. We’ve been doing 5 chapters a month, and it’s been going pretty well. Having your mind a thousand years ago is actually pretty good right now.
I think if you’d asked me whether I’d ever read Genji again after my second read of it around age 25, I’d have said no. It’s important to have read it as a Japan lit person, but twice was more than enough. But I’m actually really enjoying it this time. I’m reading the Washburn translation this time, and it’s much easier going that the Tyler translation was. But also, I think having it be a group of friends reading together rather than a class, and the additional age to appreciate some of the characters more, really has made a difference. It still has a lot of issues because that society has a lot of issues, but it’s been a balm to read, for the most part, which is more than I’d expected. ^_^
When I was but a lad, I was deeply invested in the Battletech expanded universe novels, and a recent search for comfort reading led me back in search of something unchallenging. To my surprise, Michael Charette's "Wolves on the Border" offers a rather more nuanced approach to questions of honour, duty and the boundaries of friendship than I recalled (or indeed, than one might imagine from a novel that is, on the face of it, about men in ridiculous giant robots kicking the absolute snot out of each other).
I wonder how much else is buried in what we can often dismiss as "just" tie-in fiction for various franchises?
My childhood love, Swallows & Amazons, turns out to be just as good on adult reading (maybe better because I remember the childhood reading as well). It's feminist before its time, and the adult characters turn out to be almost as interesting and nuanced as the child characters.
Ancillary Justice is one of my favorite books ever, but I had to put it down and come back to it. The pronouns made it very difficult for me to envision characters. So much of the short-hand of whoa person is comes down to gender. Once I got past that, it was a wonderfully engaging read.
Lord of the Rings. I've failed to finish rereading it for 30-odd years. If they were lucky, I left the hobbits at Rivendell, but the barrow wights got them once! But Philip Reeve blogged his reread over the summer (https://philipreeveblog.blogspot.com) and it spurred me on. It was immensely satisfying to come back to: so much forgotten; so many good memories.
On the other I hand, I tried to reread Jude the Obscure some years back. I had been my favourite Hardy. Hated it so, so much.
Oh my gosh, I LOVE Lud-in-the-Mist! In terms of books I've returned to, I disliked the stories of Borges the first time I read them. They just seemed weirdly basic. Then a couple years later I came back and was floored. They only seemed basic because of how elemental their power is.
God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert. In my youth of osmosing anything SFF that came my way, I plowed through the Dune series. On the first reading, this fourth book of the series was an *amazing* slog. It’s my first memory of outright stalling on a book, needing a few tries to “get over the hill” and roll on through it and the rest of the series. On a reread many years later, I read it voraciously. In retrospect, I think I simply needed a (much) more adult mind to really appreciate that book’s storytelling.
My Sweet Orange Tree by José Mauro de Vasconcelos. It's one of those books that all children in Turkey read. I remember loving it when I was a kid, Zezé and his misadventures... When I read it again a few years ago, well... It was certainly a different experience, but a good one still. As a kid, I somehow didn't see all the sadness and neglect and poverty for what it was. I fell for Vasconcelos's storytelling. He tricked the kid-me. As an adult, I found depth and tenderness. And so much longing...for a better life, for joy, friendship, love, for all those things everyone wants and deserves as a child.
I had resisted reading Tuck Everlasting as a kid - owned it, went, ugh, another annoying magical kid who will pressure sensible girls into doing irresponsible things. I don't know what made me finally pick it up and read it a few years ago, but I was blown away by how sweet and vivid and powerfully written it is.
Mythago Wood. I probably first read it about 40 yrs ago. I don’t remember much about the experience except I found it difficult, but for some reason, I kept it and re-read it recently. It is an extraordinary book, eldritch and compelling; it’s evocation of the numinous and liminal is a wonder
A book I have new appreciation for is A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I didn't care for it that much when I read it the first time, at 9, and I certainly still have some issues with its Christian focus (in a way I don't with Wind in the Door, so odd). That said, when reading recently I found a lot to love. In particular, I adore how L'Engle saw and called out the West's wasteful ways and its super-narrow perspective.
Not a book, but when I first read Thornton Wilder's Our Town in my early 20s, it left me cold - but then when I re-read it years later before seeing a production, it left me in tears. Yes, I acknowledge the observations that it's not a universal story in many respects, but I still found it to be powerful in its embrace of the ordinary moments of life.
Took me three attempts to finish Gaiman's American Gods. I gave up on it two times thinking it was too dense for me. But then I went back to it at a time when my attention was not so fragmented because of social media and found it worth the time and effort. It was wondrous that time.