I was in a reading funk a few months ago, but it turns out that rereading an old favorite does, in fact, get one out of the doldrums.
Starting with Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle and adding a couple of doses of Madeleine L’Engle, I was able to reignite my reading spark.
I don’t usually get into a reading funk, so this one surprised me. I might sometimes cool on fiction and read more non-fiction, or I might get so caught up in a novel that nothing else matters but finishing it. But rarely do I find myself bored with books. Usually, I can always find something new to excite me.
Last fall, however, I just couldn’t find a book that wasn’t mediocre. They were pleasant enough—not bad books at all—just not very gripping. Nothing stirred my imagination.
I was reluctant to go back to an old favorite as a way to de-funk. I wanted something NEW to recharge me, not go back to the same old, same old. I have a tendency to reread my favorite books anyway. I’m a big re-reader. This time I wanted to get out of my funk with a new book.
My self-diagnosis back in November was that maybe I was reading too many things at once. I was juggling five or six books at a time: poetry, non-fiction, essay collections, novels. I thought the solution would be to focus on just one book. Stop being so promiscuous.
But I can’t help it. I’m a promiscuous reader. I need to have several books going at once. Trying to read just one at a time is a recipe for frustration.
So I switched tactics. I reread an old favorite. And it turns out that the tried-and-true method is tried-and-true for a reason. It works. I picked Howl’s Moving Castle for my book club to read, and wouldn’t you know it? I got excited about reading again.
Winter has been a much more fruitful reading season, so here are my favorite books for winter 2023 (not counting Howl’s, which if you haven’t read, you MUST).
The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories
Just as he once did in my childhood, LeVar Burton introduced me to this book and its author, Joan Aiken. On his podcast, he read one of the stories in this collection, a cozy but still suspenseful take on lycanthropy called “Fury Night,” and I enjoyed it so much, I sought out the book from whence it came.
How can I describe these stories? They are all fantastical in some way or other, but they don’t fit neatly into any of the genre categories we tend to use today. I suppose you could call many of them “ghost stories,” but that would imply certain things that Aiken subverts or ignores completely.
To give an example, one of the stories, “Humblepuppy,” does indeed have a ghost. A puppy. A puppy ghost. It’s at times funny, at times eerie, but in the end, it’s incredibly beautiful. It’s a ghost story that warmed my heart.
So that tells you something about this collection.
But not all. Other tales are incredibly creepy and left that tingling, unsettled feeling on the back of my neck for several hours afterward. Aiken’s imagination is off-kilter in the best of ways. She’ll have a forest inside a house, or a forest where words fall off the trees like fruit. She’ll have an old lady meeting devils in alleyway, or a priest making friends with a mouse while hiding from Elizabethan authorities. It’s hard to describe the kinds of stories Aiken writes because her stories don’t fit into neat categories.
If anything, I’d compare her to Bradbury, but she’s much more “British,” if that makes sense. Her stories are fantastical, sometimes in big ways, sometimes small, but they’re also focused on the characters, on their frailties and fears and desires. I was moved quite deeply by a number of these stories, and all of them surprised me with their imagery and ideas.
Aiken is probably better known for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but her short fiction was a delightful surprise, something that both warmed and chilled me in these dark winter months.
Black Sun
LeVar Burton (once again!) introduced me to the author of this book, Rebecca Roanhorse. He read her story, “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience,” on LeVar Burton Reads, and it was so good, I decided to keep an eye out for more of her work.
We read Black Sun for my book club (my husband’s pick, since he listens to LeVar too and wanted to read more Roanhorse), and right from the start, this story was WILD. Incredibly imaginative, evocative, original, and page-turningly good.
Part of the appeal is that Black Sun takes place not in a pseudo-medieval Eurasia but in a fantasy pre-Columbian America. There is magic and religion and complex societies, but all of it emerges from a culture we don’t often see depicted in fantasy stories. It’s told from multiple points of view, and usually in these types of books I favor certain POVs over others, but I absolutely love all the viewpoint characters in Black Sun. Each of them are sympathetic but flawed, courageous but sometimes fearful of opening up and being vulnerable with others.
So far (this is only book one of the series), there isn’t that “viewpoint bloat” we sometimes get where books progress and start adding more and more POVs, or one-off chapters, and the narrative gets almost too unwieldy.
(For instance, I love Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives, but even he has succumbed to instances of POV bloat, and when the POVs pile up, it’s harder and harder to connect to and care about the core original characters from the beginning of the series. It’s not necessarily bad, I guess, but I first noticed it in the Song of Ice and Fire series, and it’s been a pet peeve of mine ever since.)
In future books, the Between Earth and Sky series may yet suffer from too many POVs, but for now, Black Sun is a perfect balance of characters from different walks of life, different genders, different powers and goals. None of them boring, all of them engaging. It’s that genius kind of story where you love all the POVs, but they are arrayed against each other. Watching the story lines converge is like watching a slow-motion train wreck: you want to look away, but you can’t. You want everyone to live happily ever after, but fate and desire and duty have other plans.
The world-building in this book is exactly what I want in fantasy literature. It’s rich and original, but it flows beautifully throughout the story, details arising organically as we follow the characters’ journeys. I especially love the fantasy elements and how some things are considered “magic” or witchcraft, while other things (like riding around on giant crows) are just part of the normal order of things. There’s also a somewhat creepy custom for one of the clans to stain their teeth red, and the imagery of that is just deliciously weird.
The world feels very real, but also wondrous and strange. It’s a dark, violent world, to be sure, but there are flashes of awe and even beauty that make me want to return for the second book.
A Circle of Quiet
A memoir/journal from Madeleine L’Engle, this book was therapeutic for me. As a writer and a mother, I often struggle to balance doing my art with taking care of my family. Whenever I read stories about writers who are moms, it reminds me that the feelings and contradictions and struggles I’m experiencing are not unique.
This book was crafted using L’Engle’s journals, and it’s hard to describe the “topic” because it ranges from reflections about her family’s farmhouse in rural Connecticut, to her difficulties with finding a publisher for A Wrinkle in Time, to her thoughts on faith and art and motherhood.
I needed this book right now because I needed a kindred spirit to help me navigate the tensions between being a writer and a parent, and also because memoirs from writers (women writers, especially) help me remember that I’m not the only one who struggles with her work. As a writer, it helps to know that people whose work you admire also went through rejections, and creative dry spells, and figuring out how to pay the bills, and suffering.
This book isn’t really SFF-related, other than L’Engle being the writer of a science fantasy classic, but I needed it this winter, particularly as I dealt with crippling back and leg pain for weeks on end. L’Engle’s realistic yet hopeful insights and observations about life helped me not just as a writer, but as a person. I was able to endure my health challenges partly due to her insights and wisdom. If nothing else, it gave me a glimpse into the thoughts and life of an author whose work made an impact on me as a child. After finishing A Circle of Quiet, I’m eager to pick up A Wrinkle in Time again and go on another journey with Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace.
L’Engle’s memoir reminded me that I need to be more willing to take risks in my art. I can’t let fear rule my creative brain, and I can’t be afraid to take a story in a new direction. That’s good advice.
Blog Posts of Interest
Since this is a bookish edition of the newsletter, here are some book-related blog posts you might enjoy.
First up, if you are looking for a book to help you get out of a funk, or if you’re just interested in reading a dark epic fantasy with a wintry milieu, check out my review of Richard Nell’s Kings of Paradise, book one of the Ash and Sand series.
If you’re interested in one of my weird theories about reading, take a look at this post about certain books being better in certain seasons.
And there are always those books, movies, music, TV shows, comics, games, etc. that shape us as children, so here are posts about two of the Things That Shaped Me: The Lone Wolf RPG Adventure Books and The Prydain Chronicles.
If you want more of my non-fiction writing, my blog is always available HERE. I hope you’ll take a look!
That’s it for now! Thank you for reading! And please consider buying or pre-ordering my books HERE, or my short stories HERE.
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