Take a look, it's in...well, you know where it is.

[mrissa]

 New essay out today in Uncanny: Book Clubs with My Imaginary Friends! The joy of reading, now refracted in fictional form! Go, read, enjoy!

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

Well, now I have several new books I need to check out?? (And several beloved books that I realized I'm due a re-read...)

What a great essay!

[mrissa]

Thanks! Also sorrynotsorry!

[pameladean]

This made me get all misty-eyed for all sorts of reasons. Also I have to read more from Fire and Hemlock.

But if I've ever asked you this before I've forgotten: did you read all the earlier Travis McGee novels? Because oh lordy, the way those books have dated.

P.

[mrissa]

Yes, I borrowed them from David! And they SURE HAVE.

[pameladean]

It's even worse now! *Looks up publication order* Oh NO, you had to read Dress Her in Indigo.

I feel I should apologize. Not necessarily for including the book, but for in the end cutting all the thrill of the forbidden, since I read the earlier books surreptitiously while babysitting my brothers, and not providing some kind of warning about how many bad fairies had visited that series.

My mom found them a huge relief from most other mystery series that we had in the house during rise times. But that's such a low bar.

P.

[mrissa]

Ahahaha it's fine. Not the worst mystery series I've read either.

[davidgoldfarb]

I am so far behind on my magazine reading — two issues of Uncanny and like four of Asimov's. Sigh.

[vcmw]

This essay is so lovely and makes me think about how much I love reading stories because of other stories.

Also I love how there are different winding reading paths people can take from the same set of allusions and references in the same books, and I think your essay does such a lovely job of reproducing the shape and feel and variation of that.

The Golden Bough was the book I dragged along with me on a teenage cross-country Greyhound bus ride, and I know that was because of Fire and Hemlock.

The high school Christopher Fry and Tom Stoppard play binges were definitely from reading Tam Lin. (And I do love how it spiders along because Christopher Fry translated some Jean Anouilh so then I ended up reading rather a lot of Jean Anouilh plays the next summer while stuck in an idiosyncratically stocked apartment…)

[mrissa]

Oh, good spidering!