December Posting Meme: Favorite Books

[phoenixfalls]

amindamazed asked: "Do you have a favorite book? If yes, what is it and why?" And sibilantly asked "Tell me about one book that you return to over and over like an old friend. What is it about that book?"

I definitely don't have a favorite book, singular. There are too many books I love, in too many different ways, to ever declare one ruler of them all. And different books have had different emotional impacts at different points in my life, too, so today's favorite may only be tomorrow's fond nostalgia!

But I can definitely talk about some favorites, plural, that have been favorites for many years, and that I do "return to over and over like an old friend."

First among them, chronologically at least, is Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. My parents always felt a little monkey's pawed, I think, with how much I loved to read; they approved, and they are both readers themselves, but the way I would spent all of my time not in school or eating meals or doing my required chores reading made them sometimes feel like maybe they should have signed me up for a sport or something? And both of them have a sort of moralistic ideal of what "good" reading versus "bad" reading is, and the way that I inhaled genre fiction seemed firmly in the "bad" reading camp for them. So my dad insisted that for every two book I picked out for myself, he would get to pick out one.

It's because of my dad, rather than the public school system, that I've read a reasonable swath of what the white male literary establishment considers Canon; it's also because of my dad that I read most of the books when I was far too young to appreciate them. I will forever hate Steinbeck, for example, because he loves Steinbeck and just would. not. stop. giving me Steinbeck novels, even though I found them all incredibly boring and kind of dour. A 10/11 year old girl is just not, I think, well-equipped to appreciate Steinbeck's brand of realism. And it took me five days of driving through endless desert to make it through Great Expectations, wanting to throw it out the RV window the whole way; but when I encountered it again in high school, I kind of enjoyed it. (And I actually loved A Tale of Two Cities, which my dad was baffled by, because he hates it.)

But one of his greatest successes in picking my reading came when he handed me an old paperback called The Count of Monte Cristo. I think I read it the first time through in one sitting, and then I kept rereading it, probably once a year, the entire rest of my childhood. The book physically fell apart on me, and I had to tape it back together. It got yellowed with sun and splattered with chlorinated water from the pool and the corners of the cover wore off altogether from banging around in my backpack. I would think of a favorite scene one day, pull it out to reread just that scene, and end up sucked back into rereading the whole thing again.

And then I graduated high school and got my first job, at a bookstore. And I looked at their copies of The Count of Monte Cristo, all the different editions. And they were all like three times as thick as the copy I loved so dearly. I went home and checked the publishing information. Sure enough, all those years, all those rereads, I had been reading an abridged copy. The horror! With my very next paycheck I bought myself an unabridged version.

I can no longer read The Count of Monte Cristo in one sitting -- a thousand pages is too much even for the speed that I read at! -- but it's still an absolute favorite. The abridgement was actually a pretty good one -- it got pretty much everything, there were no plot lines or important scenes in the unabridged version that I didn't already know. But there is so much more to the unabridged version, so many lovely little details, so much more world to wallow in.

I can't exactly say why I love The Count of Monte Cristo so much, to tell the truth. It reminds me of. . . so I have this complicated relationship with hurt/comfort fic, where I like the idea of it, and the hurt part of a well-written h/c fic builds up all the right tension for me, but then the comfort part. . . it sometimes messes with my head? It doesn't provide the sort of catharsis I like, and often leaves me feeling worse afterward. But The Count of Monte Cristo, as a revenge story, works so much better for me. There's those first couple hundred pages of hurt, Edmond being thrown away and forgotten in that dungeon, and then the following 700-800 pages of Edmond building himself back up and fixing everything himself. There's something about the amount of agency he has throughout that fits better in my brain, that makes his happy ending the right sort of catharsis for me.

Switching gears, another book I return to again and again (and one that is actually portable, rather than a tome that I need proper elbow support to read) is Agatha Christie's The Seven Dials Mystery. It's not technically the first Agatha Christie novel I read -- my dad gave me And Then There Were None sometime around 8th/9th grade -- but it is the Agatha Christie novel that started my Agatha Christie kick, which resulted in me eventually tracking down all of them.

When I was eighteen, my (Japanese) grandparents took me on a trip to Italy, along with one of my cousins. I figured I'd be out sightseeing all the time and thus only brought two books, both of them travel-themed.

There was actually more time spent in the hotel room than I anticipated -- my grandparents were not exactly night owls, and my cousin and I didn't have endless money to keep going out (also I'm not really a bar or club person) -- but I didn't really regret my lack of reading material until all of us came down with food poisoning in some little town in the Italian Alps.

Luckily for me, my cousin had a couple Agatha Christie novels she was willing to share with me. The first one I tried was The Seven Dials Mystery, and I was hooked. I read it, I read the other two my cousin brought, and then the rest of the trip every time I spotted a bookstore I ducked in, found their English-language section, and bought whatever Agatha Christie novels they had. (They invariably had at least one!) And when I got home, I put my bookstore job to good use, using my discount to buy a couple more Christie mysteries with every paycheck.

But The Seven Dials Mystery remains one of my favorites to this day. It's got a sense of humor about it that I really like, and Superintendent Battle appears (he's always been one of my favorite recurring characters), and you know, I even enjoy the touch of a romantic subplot. I remember who the villain is when I reread it these days, but it took at least three rereads for that information to stick. And it's just the perfect size for a cozy afternoon read with a mug of tea or hot chocolate, about three hours of delightful escapism.

But given that I consider myself primarily a science fiction and fantasy fan, this post would not be complete without at least one SFF entry. Most of my favorite SFF novels are going to end up in a different book post, about my most influential reads, but there's one book (one series, actually) that I think fits best here: Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.

Both my parents were lovers of this series long before me, but both apparently thought it too much "popcorn" reading to recommend, so I had to discover it on their shelves myself sometime in college. But eventually the omnibus of Shards of Honor and Barrayar (aka the Cordelia books) found its way into my hands, and I fell in love immediately. At that point the last book in the series was Diplomatic Immunity, and to tell the truth, I have to remind myself that there are actually three books further than that in existence. (I'm probably not alone in this, given the eight year gap between it and Cryoburn!)

It's an eminently readable series -- Bujold's writing is crisp and clear and her plots move along wonderfully and hang together at the end. The action is well-paced, her characters are both extremely likable and memorable. They're just solid books all around, beautiful examples of the craft and of the genre they belong to. (Which is space opera, in case you aren't familiar!)

But the reason they're some of my favorite books of all time is how filled they are with a very humanist sensibility. There are so many beautiful, wry moments, clear-eyed but empathetic about the way that people are. I can't truly say these books were influential because my values and personality were fairly well-developed by the time I encountered them; but they do resonate with what I consider all the best parts of myself.

Comments

[enemyofperfect]

Well, count me down as vastly more interested in The Count of Monte Cristo than I ever was before! Revenge is very rarely my thing, but a good chunk of hurt followed by 700+ pages of picking up the pieces very much could be. Do you have a favorite translation?

[phoenixfalls]

I have the Modern Library edition, which doesn't list the translator but which I'm pretty sure is the most common, Victorian-era, English-language translation. (The internet won't tell me who it's by; all it says is that it was published by Chapman & Hall in 1846.) I've heard that the new (as in mid-1990s) Robin Buss translation is superior, because it puts back in some stuff that that Victorian-era translation took out as too racy, but I've also heard it modernizes the language, which doesn't really appeal to me. Also, the thing most commonly cited as taken out (there's subplot about a pair of lesbians who run off together!) was still pretty obvious even in my translation. Like, maybe it's fully text in French and in the modern translation, while in my translation it's kind of subtextual? But it's bash-you-over-the-head-with-the-subtext level of subtext.

[enemyofperfect]

Oh wow, now I'm even more intrigued! Thank you so much. :D