A book finds you.

[Outlandish]

"You know what Les, sometimes we don't pick the books we read, they pick us.

Sam Chaiton - [to Lesra] - Rubin "Hurricane" Carter"

Please, describe which book found you and share with us, what you think about this saying .

[Pompey Bum]

I like its Tolstoyan sense of fate.

Well, they all found me. How could it be otherwise? I didn't write them. But the book whose unexpected appearance opened the gates of Troy for the others was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which I blundered upon in a 7th grade school book fair. Professor Challenger's dubious lizards made way soon enough for the unofficial consulting detective himself, followed in due course by the heaving bosoms of Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker. One day I happened to find myself in a tumbril (only dimly aware of what a tumbril actually was) when a little seamstress asked me to hold her hand. As the guillotine loomed up before us, I noticed a small miracle (for a 13-year-old boy) running down my face and silently dropping to the page. That doomed seamstress and I have kept a merry company ever since, but it has always been understood between us that what happens in the tumbril stays in the tumbril. :)

I feel bound to another book, too, but with more of a Poe-ish sense of grim destiny than one of philosophical Tolstoyan fate. Twenty-five years ago, on a whim, I bought an odd book called The Quincunx by Charles Palliser--a 1000 page Dickens pastiche--shortly after an unexpected and devastating death in my family. Its plot, which draws a David Copperfield-like boy into an incrementally hellish world of lies and subterfuge, due to his role in an inheritance, paralleled my own life so closely that the book seemed almost supernatural. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it is not. The writing was highly compelling and at one point I tried (unsuccessfully) to stop reading it, as if I were attempting to break a curse or something. Even now, 25 years later, the Quincunx seems a little--haunted? That's very much how it felt at the time in any case.

Okay, that's pretty weird. It was a long time ago, and things got much better for me. Today, I look back on The Quincunx as an important book in my life, and a masterpiece in its own weird way. But frankly it's difficult to know about the latter. It's easy too get too close to a book when you're going through a lot of pain. Maybe I'm just remembering drama from my own life that I was reading into the book. Or maybe I was just living in the book because it was less painful than facing my own life. It was a long time ago, and I really don't know.

I still keep the dilapidated hard-bound copy of The Quincunx that I carried in those days among the best books I have in my bookcase. I have often thought to reread it to see if it still holds up. I haven't done that so far, although I recently purchased the ebook version from Amazon with the idea of giving it a try. I would hate to find out after all these years that it wasn't a very good book after all, but even if I did, I would still feel a bond with it. Of all the books I have read, The Quincunx seems to have been the one that most "found me."

[Lykren]

I'm still looking to be found. If you made me pick one right now it would be The Tale of Genji. The idea of a gentle, hyper-romantic aesthete falling in love with every other woman he sees strangely appeals to me. :blush5:

[Pompey Bum]

Try Candide, it's shorter. ;-)

[Lykren]

I thought you were the one who feels cheated if a book you're reading is too short?

[Pompey Bum]

Candide's an exception: Voltaire's anti-novel--it's just so good at what it does.

[Lykren]

Well okay, I'lll be reading it soon anyways, if "once I finish Proust" can be termed "soon." From descriptions I've read, though, it really doesn't seem like it'll give me anything like the feeling Genji gave me. But I'd certainly enjoy being proven wrong on that point!

[Pompey Bum]

It won't. That was my (ironic) point. Candide is a pin in the balloon the western novels that also presented "gentle, hyper-romantic aesthete[s]" as protagonists; the novel form in general (which Voltaire despised); and most of all, fashionable and philosophical optimism. It's just so great. You could read Candide in an afternoon. Proust will forgive you!

And since you inquire about the sacred mysteries of literary miserliness, Candide is available for free all over the Internet. I only feel cheated when I actually have to pay. :)

Here's an online version, with my compliments:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19942/19942-h/19942-h.htm

Or you can download it here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19942

[Lykren]

Oh I already have it. But I'm reading Pale Fire and the selected poems of Ezra Pound as well at the moment, so I'm stuffed full for now. But fear not, I will get around to it!

I liked Genji because its romantic aestheticism (if those are the terms we're going with) didn't seem forced or insincere the way, for example, Tom Jones did to me (sorry; I think I remember you mentioning that you are a Fielding fan). So I doubt Candide will be an effective pin to Genji's balloon, particularly given that the overall tone of Genji is hardly straightforwardly upbeat.

EDIT: Just saw your addition of the word ironic in parentheses to the above post. Well, okay, I suppose I should've guessed that you were poking gentle fun at my unabashed admiration for Genji's softness! :)

[Pompey Bum]

I haven't actually read Genji yet, or much other Japanese literature. But yes, you will usually find me (with Voltaire) troubling good people like you. It's a privilege of age. :)

[Lykren]

Oooh, if you ever do you're in for a treat. Give the Tyler translation a shot.

[Pompey Bum]

Thanks. Once it comes on Gutenberg. (Just kidding. :))

[Clopin]

Crime and Punishment. I was reading Catch-22 before I really read 'literature', and one of the characters (Clevinger I believe) compares Yossarian to Raskolnikov at one point; this accompanied by a footnote in my edition explaining who Raskolnikov actually was and where he came from I found, for some reason, very intriguing and checked the book out the next week. And actually Dostoyevsky kick-started my reading of 'deep and meaningful' literary fiction. I just followed the footnotes, from Turgenev to Tolstoy to Gogol to Pushkin to Lermontov to Hugo, etc, etc.

Also I would say that I 'apprehended' (Thanks Tom) The Wasteland before I actually read it... or even had any idea what it as about.

[SilentMute]

I have to say that I felt that way about maybe four books in my life. When I was a kid, I was introduced to the joy of reading when I bought Ramona Quimby, Age 8 at the book fair. Ramona had actually tried to entice me before, but my brain found reading too strenuous until I was around eight years old. To me, it seemed like a gigantic novel, and I was very proud of myself for being able to finish it. Later, in my teens, I was also drawn into the Sweet Valley High series.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is a more recent book that gripped me. It is beautiful and always touches me. A lighter read that I just became enthralled by is The Paper Magician. I think my love of paper mache made me love this book.