in Life's name and for Life's sake

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I might not believe in reincarnation as such, but I do believe that all writers live on past death in the things that they've written.

"For Books are not absoltely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule whose progeny they are." --John Milton, Areopagitica

I don't have the time to do this justice, but better something short than nothing at all.

When I got back from Paris, I heard from a friend that one of my old Berkeley professors had passed away. Her name was Janet Adelman, and she was amazing. I took 45A with her, and spent a semester finding new literary love in strange places, from Chaucer to Spenser to -- wait for it -- Milton. Yes, this is the woman who first introduced me to Paradise Lost and started me off on something so much larger than her, or me, or probably even Milton himself.

She was fiery. She was old, and it wasn't like she was trying to hide it: she wore her white hair long, and dressed with an eclectic fashion only allowed to those who are conscious of their own age and milking it for all its worth (when I picture her now, she's wearing crazy-awesome robelike garments that no one in the universe should be allowed to pull off, and yet she does).

She was old but she showed you that didn't really mean much. She wasn't that quivering Victorian grandmother who blushed at the slightest sign of indecency. She was a dyed-in-the-wool feminist and considering dates and ages she was probably a part of the second-wave feminism of the 60s and 70s, and also part of the resurgence of psychoanalytic theory in English departments/studies at the time. She gave a powerful reading of Satan's sense of indebtedness to God that shifted into anger and the desire to destroy, all based on (vaguely feminist) psychoanalysis. And she made a powerful argument for Milton as a feminist (though I'm not entirely sure how much modern critics would agree). In fact, rather than being angry with these old works by men who wrote in a time when pretty much only men wrote, she took them and combed them through for signs of understanding of women and an attempt to fairly portray them. She might have been a feminist but she never got righteously angry about it, at least not in the classroom.

But it wasn't just in the classroom where she mattered. I still remember the first time I went to visit her in office hours. I wasn't really liking Chaucer and not quite sure what to say, but I walked in, sat down, and said something lame like, "So. Chaucer." To which she responded, "Oh, not him yet, I still don't know you!" When I came back from spring break after Rick broke up with me and went to her office hours again she asked me how break had gone and I mumbled something before starting in on Spenser, which was greatly preferable to a discussion of my own emotional unrest. And yet a month or so later it came up in our office hours discussion and she told me she'd thought that something was wrong back then, but that she knew I was dealing with it and that I could always come to her with problems.

She wrote me one of the letters of recommendation that got me here, studying abroad in London. The last time I saw her -- at least, the last time I really remember -- was when I walked by her office and picked up that letter. She hadn't sealed it yet when I arrived -- she wanted me to read it over first -- and though I don't remember exactly what it said now, I just remember that it reinforced my feeling that she really somehow understood. She was such a gift.

Janet Adelman is not a woman that I, or anyone, will easily forget. But me especially. She continues to make it into my fiction, lending sometimes her name and sometimes her appearance to a series of benevolent grandmotherly figures who nonetheless know when to shove their children out into the world and help them face it. She is the kind witch of my Printer's Tale who gives Noelle shelter and asks no questions until the time is right -- with her robes and her long white hair and her kind and deep brown eyes. She is a figure of power. And though I'm sad to know that she's gone, I'm full of a certainty that "gone" isn't really too final, and that somewhere out there she's arguing feminism with Milton (and winning).

Day one • a song
Day two • a picture
Day three • a book
Day four • a site
Day five • a youtube clip
Day six • a quote
Day seven • whatever tickles your fancy

Conveniently, I have come across another meme that allows me to sort of answer this one by providing a whole lot of stuff about books!

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Not having my bookshelf in front of me at this moment (it being in another country and all) it's hard to say, but probably Anne McCaffrey, simply because she is so prolific. I own all of her Dragonriders of Pern books (multiple copies of some of them) plus assorted others. She takes up a jam-packed half-shelf.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
This is probably a toss-up between Jane Eyre and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. For Jane Eyre, I have the first copy I read (a falling-apart-at-the-seams $0.25 library bookstore purchase), the first critical copy I bought (because I really liked the introduction), two copies of the one with the killer engravings (yes, two, they were only $1 a piece), and the copy that I bought in London this semester to read for my Fiction and Narrative class. As for Sorcerer's Stone, I possess it in paperback, hardback, UK paperback, special edition (leather-bound and gold-edged pages), and the Latin translation. But I am the kind of person who thinks it's awesome to have multiple copies of the same book, particularly if they possess different cover art or have some interesting distinguishing feature, so there may well be some other book that I possess five copies of.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Considering I just ended my last response with a preposition, I'm going to say no.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
I can't give one answer. Remus Lupin is mostly an intellectual crush. I love Mr. Darcy but more because I identify strongly with Elizabeth. Same goes for Mr. Rochester -- I like him because I am so attuned to Jane. I feel guilty loving fictional characters who are already (fictionally) attached! Also, of course, I love Nik from Julie E. Czerneda's Species Imperative trilogy and Enris from the Stratification trilogy.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
I feel like it's probably one of the Harry Potter books or a Young Wizards book, simply because those books were my favorites long before I read any of the other books that are currently my favorites. I feel like I've read Jane Eyre a million times but the truth is that I've just listened to my audiobook a million times; I've only read it cover-to-cover maybe three or four times.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
Probably Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban -- I know I read it before I turned eleven because once I turned eleven I kept waiting for my owl from Hogwarts to come...

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
Breaking Dawn. Enough said.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Usually the answer to this would be a Julie E. Czerneda book, hands down, but Rift in the Sky was such a traumatic experience that I'm not sure I can say I liked it that much. I probably don't have a 'best' list, but I really came to like Neil Gaiman (mostly for The Graveyard Book and Neverwhere), George R. R. Martin redefined 'epic' for me with A Game of Thrones, and most recently Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca sent chills all up and down my spine.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane. Her books have changed my life and I can't imagine not having them in the world.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
J. K. Rowling. Her books have done more to unite the world under a banner of peace, love, and understanding than any author now alive.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Probably Diane Duane's Young Wizards books. There was actually a project to do this a while back, and Duane herself was going to write the script (before becoming a fiction writer she wrote for film and television).

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Paradise Lost. Despite the fact that at one point last year there were two projects (one studio, one independent) attempting this. I don't know why.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I was talking with Julie E. Czerneda and she got mad at me for not having made Rebecca read her books. Another time Diane Duane told me that I was being cocky because she overheard me tell my dad that I really wanted to be published by a particular sff imprint.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
The more expensive variety of paperback romance...actually, the Twilight books are probably worse. And I read fanfic, so do with that what you like.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Absalom, Absalom! by Faulkner is the first that comes to mind because it's difficult to get the story, much less something of the deeper meaning. But Paradise Lost might be the book where I've had to do the most digging for insight and meaning -- and where it has been most worthwhile.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
Probably Love's Labours Lost -- I have read more obscure Shakespeare plays than I have seen.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
Oh man, my favorite revolutionaries. It's hard to pick (the Russians have Chekov!) but in the end I have to go with the French. As long as you understand that they're rarely meant to make sense, you'll be alright.

18) Roth or Updike?
No idea who these people are.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Managed to never read either of them.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Milton, hands down. See the part where that man consumed last semester at Berkeley (in a rather painfully joyous way).

21) Austen or Eliot?
Um, since when is that a question? Austen. Definitely.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I have never read anything written before Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. For non-English majors this is not at all a gap, but for me it means I haven't read Homer, Virgil, or Dante, only some of the most alluded-to authors that I've never encountered.

23) What is your favorite novel?
The Wizard's Dilemma by Diane Duane

24) Play?
Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, The Last Five Years (score by Jason Robert Brown), Metamorphosis (not by Ovid!)

25) Poem?
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds" by Shakespeare; "When I consider how my light is spent" by Milton

26) Essay?
"Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story" by Michael Chabon

27) Short story?
I don't really like short fiction -- either reading it or writing it. "Skin So Green and Fine" is an odd Beauty and the Beast retelling that makes the cut; "Attached Please Find my Novel" is a tale of intergalactic publishing escapades that's in it for the title alone.

28) Work of non-fiction?
Erm. I don't read those?

29) Graphic novel?
See above. Although I recently read Maus and thought it was fantastic.

30) Who is your favorite writer?
Aargh hatred for this question. But it's down to Diane Duane, Julie E. Czerneda, and J. K. Rowling.

31) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
I wouldn't know, I haven't read him!

32) What is your desert island book?
Tough question, but probably A Thousand Words for Stranger or The Wizard's Dilemma. Both are narratives of hope and connection in the midst of a chaotic world. But Paradise Lost might make the list because I could use all that time I was stranded to get all my Milton ideas out of my system and onto some paper.

33) And ... what are you reading right now?
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

I feel like I am simultaneously under- and over-prepared for basically every one of my finals. I am in a classroom in Wheeler and for no apparent reason decided to hook up my laptop to the AV system. Well. Mostly so I could use the speakers to listen to Pride and Prejudice music. I turned in my kickass Milton paper that makes my life complete, I have my hardest final tomorrow followed by my family coming up for my birthday on Sunday and then two much less difficult finals on Tuesday. I have been reading literary criticism of Milton for fun (and it is fun). I really want to go to Cheese Board on Saturday (oh shit that's tomorrow) because I will miss it dreadfully when I am gone and the pizza looks great.

Really, I want to run outside and cartwheel through the grass in the sun and not worry about anything -- and quote Milton at people for shits and giggles, and maybe some Romantic poets too, since they're all stuck in my head at the moment. And beyond that, I just want to sit for a full day and do nothing but read Turn Coat (the new Jim Butcher book, which my mother bought me for my b-day) and Good Omens (because I have yet to read it, and this is unacceptable) and this Irish play that one of my friends gave me and that I need to get back to him by Tuesday.

Summer will be easily as crazy as school, but in different ways -- and although I'll miss Berkeley like no other, it won't be terrible to be home. At least, for the first two weeks.

Right now I might just need to do something crazy.

All things considered, life is going well.

I only have three more classes before finals. Only one of those is an actual lecture. One is my last decal workshop, and the last one involves going down to my printing professor's studio to bind books and hang out and generally party with my fellow printing classmates. So not a bad deal, all things considered. I literally have four things due before the end of the semester (finals not included): three critiques for my decal due Monday, and my final Milton paper due Thursday.

Ah, the Milton paper. Where to begin? It captivated me when I should have been writing my paper for the Romantics. I began working on it and thinking through its terms at least a month ago. It helps that I almost obsessively attend Professor Picciotto's office hours, because I love talking with her about literature. So anyway, I knew what I was writing about for this paper long before I knew what I was writing about for my Romantics paper (which was of course due this Monday, and which was not nearly as pleasant as the Milton paper is being).

I had to struggle to make the Romantics paper long enough while still maintaining coherence. The Milton paper is the exact opposite. When I finally sat down and compiled all my notes and analyses, just writing, I ended up with a 16-page handwritten first draft. This translated to about 13 double-spaced pages in MLA format. The essay was supposed to be 6-8 pages long. But when I talked to Picciotto in office hours today -- for what I cannot believe was the last time until after I get back from the UK! -- and she told me that she doesn't want me to butcher this, she'd rather read a 15-page paper that covers all my points than an 8-page paper that cramps my observations. Am I crazy for being excited that I'm allowed to write a longer paper? I don't care. Seriously, hearing from her that I just have to keep it to 15 pages made my life a whole lot easier.

Since early on in the process of working over this topic with her, she's been suggesting that this is thesis material. Now, in the process of actually writing out everything that was in my head, I suspect she may be right. I keep finding more and more things I can say, more and more ways to expand into different passages in Paradise Lost, or into Milton's other works, or into new avenues of criticism. I have a suspicion that this Milton thesis might actually get written -- the inducement of working closely with Picciotto on an intellectual process is pretty strong.

The problem with this is the small voice in my head that wonders why in the world I'd write a thesis on Milton if he's not who I want to study in grad school. But then that same small voice admits that Milton's fun to work with, and although I'd get sick of no strong female characters and the inability to read novelistically after a while, in concentrated bursts there are things MUCH worse than Milton. And Milton and the Romantics are so integrally connected that maybe it isn't entire nonsense to write about Milton's poetry even if I decide that what I really want to focus on is romanticism and the novel.

(The craziest voice in my head thinks that I should write TWO theses -- this Milton one as an independent study with Picciotto during my first semester, along with one on the Romantics during the traditional English honors year-long course. You can understand why I have called this voice in my head the craziest one. I am endeavoring to ignore it for the sake of my personal health and sanity but it does not desire to be resisted.)

But anyways, in the aspects of my life which are not Milton, everything else is going well. I saw Star Trek last night with Natasha and her people and it was AWESOME. Seriously. How did I not understand the awesomeness that is Star Trek before this? But as a result of this I did not go to sleep last night until something around the order of 2am, and woke up (like usual) at about 8am...six hours of sleep is probably NOT the best plan. I'm just at that point of tiredness now where I don't want to do even the meager homework that I ought to do; I just want to lounge around for a little while more before sleeping. I figure I deserve it. I wrote more of my paper today, had my last day as an Office of Letters and Light intern until after I get back from the UK (*tears up*) and finished editing my notes on Romanticism. All in all, pretty good stuff.

Guys, I'm happy. I know what I want to do with my life, and the people that matter all believe that I'm going to get there. My cheek muscles hurt with smiling. Life is just so worth it.

I for sure have homework I should be doing now -- like the reading I promised myself I'd finish today, so that I could spend tomorrow beginning work on the 8-10 page essay that's due for my romantics class on May 4th (I know, I know, that sounds like forever away, but this is probably the latest I've ever started thinking about an essay that long). In contrast, I have what I believe is a 6-8 page Milton essay due May 14th and I've already seen my Milton professor about it three or four times and have massive planning documents (this is also because I have a suspicion that Picciotto is turning me into an unwilling Miltonist). The paper might be shorter than that, actually.

I've basically been entirely ignoring Astronomy, but that's probably not a good idea, and probably my grade in the class is starting to reflect it. But I can't bring myself to think about H-R diagrams when the alternatives are so much more alluring.

This is just procrastinating. I should go now.

Oh. And I'm also still trying to write a screenplay for Script Frenzy this month, and I don't know why. I'm occasionally interested but most of the time it just feels like a chore. Currently, I'm trying to figure out how two of my characters fell in love, and I can't for the life of me recall. I feel like there was some scene, some revelation, some moment where the love was understood -- but I'm adapting a former NaNoWriMo novel into a screenplay with the added challenge of not looking back to the source text of the novel, and so I don't know exactly what's going on. Maybe I should stop trying it and stick to NaNoWriMo? Who knows.

It has recently been brought to my attention that GLBT fiction has slowly been stripped of its Amazon.com sales rankings because it has been labeled "adult."

From Dear Author:

What’s going on?

For those who don’t know, Amazon has decided to derank and then remove from front page searches books labeled “erotic” and GLBT. For example, books that are about Lesbian parenting have been identified as “adult content” and deranked. Patti O’Shea’s book that is listed “erotic horror” despite having only one sex scene has been deranked and removed from front page search results. Amazon has deranked Annie Proulx, E.M. Forster, but not American Psycho. Mein Kampf and books about dog fighting are ranked and can be searched from the front page, but not books about gay love or books with erotic content.

You can track more of the deranked books on twitter.

Why is this is a big deal?

It’s not because customers put any stock into the Amazon Ranking number. It’s that the Amazon Rank affects a books’ visibility on the bestseller list, on the “If you Like ___, you might like __ feature” and so forth. It is akin to the bookstore removing the books from the shelves and requiring you to go to the Customer Service desk and ask for the book or author specifically. Visibility is a huge factor in sales and anyone who doesn’t believe that is kidding themselves.

More information from Dear Author can be found here, including a form letter you can send Amazon's customer service department expressing your disapproval. There is also a petition you can sign.

Mark R. Probst also has a discussion of how this de-ranking has affected him personally; his young adult novel The Filly, which he describes as a "gay western" and which, while it contains gay romance, contains no explicit content, has been removed from Amazon rankings. Similar removals include the

Another blog has initiated "google bombing" of the term Amazon Rank (click the link for a witty and appropriate definition of what Amazon rank has become).

This disgusts me. I firmly believe that it represents censorship, the limitations of the public -- everything Milton was writing against in Areopagitica, everything that our First Amendment was written to protect us against. I can understand not wanting truly adult material to show up in searches, but if that were Amazon.com's real intention, they could have made sure that all adult content is similarly blocked, straight erotica included. They could have done what LiveJournal does, and warned users that the content they are about to view may be unsuitable for children. They could have been up front about these policy changes. Instead, they have been operating in an underhanded manner, and attempted to use their extreme power over internet book-buying to turn Amazon Rank into a reflection of a very narrow vision of what is suitable content for adults.

Please pass this on to everyone you know. The blogosphere, thankfully, is dependent upon far too many individual providers for any singular instance of censorship to spread widely enough to silence us.

My creative writing professor has a tendency (one I don't terribly like, though I suppose I only slightly dislike it) to ask students, "Where did this story come from?" As though a) we know where it came from and b) it's something impersonal enough to share with a group of relative strangers.

But I'm thinking about the Satan story (titled "First Disobedience" in loving disregard for Milton), and how I'd answer the question if he asked me about it. I came up with the fact that it's a fictional theodicy (helpfully defined as "a vindication of the divine attributes, particularly holiness and justice, in establishing or allowing the existence of physical and moral evil"). And then I was thinking about the word "theodicy," and decided that it would be beautiful to write a story called "Theodyssey" about a main character questing to come to a personal understanding of the presence of evil in the world.

Yes. This will now be written!! Even if only for personal enjoyment.

EDIT: And I think I have the first paragraph (or at least the first draft of the first paragraph) of my story.

Intellectually, the Satan had known all along that his new job had a high turnover rate, but leaning back in his leather swivel chair and observing the view out the window of his 101st story corner office, he really didn’t understand why. He thought, as he had many times since receiving this ultimate promotion, that being the Satan couldn’t be any harder than his millennia spent as Sub-Director of Public Relations (Unnatural Disasters Department). At the very least, even if the job did turn out to be more difficult than he had expected, it would not be boring. Some jobs, no matter that they each served God in unique and meaningful ways, were made for angels of different stuff than he. A puny ten years as Customer Service Liaison for Lesser Mesopotamia had been enough to instill in him a desire for progression upward through the heavenly hierarchy, but the angel who’d succeeded him seemed to derive great joy from answering prayers about discomforts as diverse as crocodile attacks and food poisoning with the general sense of future well-being, which was all the answer that an angel of his status could provide.

:) Now I just need to write the rest of it!

ANOTHER EDIT: Gah. The story is already turning into something else entirely, and I'm not sure what to make of it. All I know is, I need to get to work!

ANOTHER OTHER EDIT MUCH LATER (4/23/09): But it's related, I swear. In the vein of Theodyssey, I should also write something that makes fun of exegesis (the process of making sense of biblical texts) called "Exe-Jesus."

I've got a lot of disjointed thoughts that I'm trying to manage in the hour before tutoring starts and I start earning money. In some kind of organization, then.

I heard back from the study abroad office, and I'm 99% guaranteed to be attending Queen Mary University of London. I'm incredibly looking forward to going abroad, and incredibly nervous, though not for the things that I should be nervous about -- mostly about how I'll deal with it snowing in the winter, and how my folks will handle an empty nest, and other unimportant details. Oh, and perhaps how I will eat. But that, too, is not such a big deal. All I know is, it's gonna be crazy and it's gonna be scary and it's gonna be good.

I don't have very much homework to do this weekend, which makes me feel very strange... There is nothing for me to be frantically working on, and that is not a common feeling! But I don't have any major due dates until after spring break, which is very nice and only slightly eerie.

In other news, we have yet another personal-soul-searching journal prompt from my creative writing professor: we're supposed to write about the one time we were totally and completely wrong. My response to this is summed up best by the response made by one of my classmates: "Professor Farber, anything I turn in will have to be fiction!" Not that I've never done anything wrong. But I can't believe I've ever been completely, one-hundred-percent, this-really-matters-and-you-screwed-up wrong. I take great pains not to be that kind of wrong. And if I had ever been that kind of wrong, I can promise you I wouldn't be telling Farber about it.

I'm really frustrated that we don't get to write about fictional characters in these journal entries; I kind of want to talk with him about it, but I don't think he likes me very much, and I think I've snarked my last snark (out loud, that is) about the journal topics.

If anyone knows of a time when I have been particularly wrong, please tell me. I am currently and honestly at a loss.

Also, I don't know what form he wants these "journals" to take. I write mine mostly as prose ramblings (much like this one) but all the other people I've seen write theirs as scenes in which they are characters. I don't know, that just doesn't do it for me. We're allowed to write about ourselves in the first person now, but even that doesn't alleviate my larger complain about these journals. This is a fiction class. Why aren't we allowed to write fiction??

In other news, we're starting to read Paradise Lost (Milton's epic poem about Genesis. Yes, you did just hear me right) in my Milton class and I'm pretty excited. It's part of what prompted me to write the story about the Satan that I'm still mulling over. Right now my problem is that I need to find the character that the Satan would not want to test -- the person who'd make the devil throw his hands up in the air and say, "Enough already! God, why do I have to keep testing this guy's faith? Isn't it pathetically obvious he believes?" I have this vague desire to set the story in New York City without ever having traveled there, and with very little knowledge about the place. Because I can see this Satan hanging out in NYC. Maybe the person that he's tempting is just a regular kid -- but in my head, when I picture that scenario the devil becomes the Lone Power and the kid becomes Kit Rodriguez from Diane Duane's Young Wizards books (which rock so many socks it's impossible to explain or describe).

(Over an hour later, after being distracted by a conversation and by having to go to work...)

So while walking to work I had this idea that chinchillas needed to end up in this story, but then I had this horrible idea that the boy that the Satan is trying to tempt has a chinchilla, and the Satan KILLS IT! And I almost have to die for thinking that. But now I have a strange image of the boy being a smaller boy (which I don't want to do, because not that I've read The Book of Joby, nor do I intend to before writing this story, but the kid in that story is younger I think) who looks like Kit but for some reason has Star Wars bedsheets and a pet chinchilla that gets killed by the Satan. GAH.

In other news, here are some pretty pictures of how I picture my Satan. Because he's a not-so-shameless rip-off of Diane Duane's Lone Power, except not really. I think my Satan looks kind of like if you could mix Satan from Paradise Lost and the Lone One from Young Wizards (come to think about it, on some days that's how I consider my ideal fictional religion -- a cross between Milton's and Duane's perceptions of their various fictional worlds...this does not make me more of a geek or anything, of course not).

I should probably go do my job now.

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Because I don't quite feel like getting back to writing a novel yet -- the top 10 books I read this year. DISCLAIMER: The exact rankings are a little sketchy, and NO ONE is allowed to judge me based upon them. :)

10. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Okay, so I'm a little psycho. Somehow, I really liked this book. Maybe it's because I got into hours worth of conversations about it with my GSI and professor, and their discussions convinced me that it was a worthwhile book. But whether or not I actively enjoyed reading every page, I was actively reading, trying to figure out what was going on and attempting to unravel the mysteries of the Sutpen family... It was my favorite book of this fall's English class, that's for sure.

9. The Faerie Queene (Books 1 and 3) by Edmund Spenser
There are moments where this book was fun, and moments where it wasn't -- another book where analyzing it made it more interesting. I wrote what I felt was a pretty kickass paper about Spenser's allegorical method, and really enjoyed the way this book felt like Disney technicolor sometimes.

8. War for the Oaks by Emma Bull
You'd think that it wouldn't be the best idea to read a love story right after you've been broken up with. But Danica kept telling me this was a good book, and I needed something new, so I read it. It wasn't overall captivating, but there were moments of it that I really enjoyed, and it deserves to be on the list for its originality at the very least.

7. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
This book probably belongs waaaay higher up on the list, but I can't make a definite decision about it because I've only read it once, and rather recently, thus biasing me. I read most of it in one or two sittings, and it was my first exposure to LeGuin. I still don't know entirely what to think, other than to be awed by her command of worldbuilding and to wonder at her sparse yet evocative writing style.

6. Sabriel by Garth Nix
Another book I'd been told to read forever and had never gotten around to until I got to review it for Teens Read Too. The premise and the style are so unique, somehow so clean, and there's something about the characters that makes me wish I could see a little more of them. I've already re-read it once.

5. Paradise Lost by John Milton
The language may seem as impenetrable as a brick wall, but it's also as beautiful as a work of art -- it is a work of art. I read this for an English class, as you might guess, but somewhere along the line, I fell in love with it. Possibly because of the analysis of it, but not to the same extent as with Faulkner and Spenser. This, I would enjoy even outside of the analytical context, whereas I have a feeling that if I encountered Faulkner or Spenser outside of the classroom I would have been too frightened to make anything of them. I'm beginning to realize how much I learn about life in the English classroom -- be it religion, individuality, feminism, you name it, Milton probably had something to say about it, and I'm glad to have read it. (Plus -- where else are you going to get a description of angels having sex in iambic pentameter??)

4. Small Favor by Jim Butcher
Harry Dresden will always make me laugh and sometimes also make me cry, or at least realize the tenderness and poignancy in the world around me. This book did more of the former than the latter, but was just what the doctor ordered. It left me, as they always do, waiting for the next one.

3. Slightly Married by Mary Balogh
I decided to put only one of the romance novels I've been reading on this list, because it was difficult to choose between them -- but this is the first in a series, and includes some of the characters that I enjoyed the most. Again, the mode in which I encountered this novel probably has a decent amount to do with why I enjoyed it so much. Rebecca and I read it out loud together! Skipping all the intensely smutty parts, of course. :) But seriously, I love being read to. It's one of my favorite things. We're now working our way through the series and are on the fourth book of six. (Rebecca, if you're reading this, I miss Gervase!)

2. Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane
So technically I'm not sure this book should count, since this was certainly not the first time I read it by any means. But as usual, Diane Duane played an important role in the process of my life, this time by providing me with something to fall asleep to so I wouldn't have to think about who I wouldn't be waking up to. More than that, she made me cry for all the right reasons and remember that men and women can have healthy relationships predicated entirely upon friendship, even if only in fiction.

1. Riders of the Storm by Julie E. Czerneda
As usual, Julie takes the cake for renewing my sense of awe and wonder at the universe. I think I've probably said enough about this book already, but I suppose a few more words won't hurt. I haven't re-read it yet, but I plan to do so in the new year. Then, I'll know how good it actually is -- first readings are occasionally inaccurate -- but for now I can just say that it's the first time in a long time that I've cried for joy.

...aaaaand now I officially can't procrastinate anymore, not if I really want to get this novel done, which I do, I do! I am so psyched about this!