Playing Favorites

Talk about an impossible question.

It’s easy for me to pick the first two books; those jumped into my head immediately. The third one is going to be a doozy, so let me at least talk about what I can talk about.

Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice

This book (and really the first four books in the series) is probably the first one I remember getting really obsessed with, to the point that one of my teachers in high school told me I was single-handedly keeping Anne Rice fiscally sound. I don’t think I ever would have found it if I hadn’t seen the Tom Cruise movie first, and this is with having a natural predilection for all things weird and spooky.

Books weren’t as easy to find in the 90s because the internet wasn’t really available to regular folks just yet (it took til the mid-90s and college for that to happen for me). I’d drop dead these days before watching a movie prior to reading the book it was based on, but such was the way of it in those days. Whatever the reason for me finding it, I found it and the rest was sort of history for me.

Long story short, this book helped little old high school misfit me (I had just moved to cow town New England from the Bronx in NYC six months before freshman year, so yeah, I stuck out a little) reclaim a little of the power I felt like I lost when people made assumptions about or ignored me altogether.

It helped to show me that there’s beauty and agency in being different and owning it. I never felt quite as othered as the populations that often claim Anne’s works as an inspiration, but it eased the sting where I was and gave me hope for the future. Lestat was, and remains, a source of inspiration for me, and I can’t really put it better than Anne herself when she said he was the side of her that never really saw the light of day (no pun intended). I wouldn’t have to be afraid of any of the things I was afraid of then (rejection, burgeoning sexuality, etc.) if I was as all-powerful as Lestat was. Granted, his confidence was well in place prior to being “born to darkness”, but if I didn’t have to worry about the big stuff like dying, and pain, and getting old, what’s left?

I’m as convinced now as I was in high school that vampirism would solve all of my problems, but only if it’s the sexy kind where you can, well, have sex.

Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone – JK Rowling

I was well past the target audience for this when I discovered it in 1998 (I was 20 and a sophomore/junior in college), but it was no less special for me having read it as an adult. Those years were tumultuous for me – my parents were recently divorced, my mother was newly diagnosed as bipolar, we were forced to leave the house in CT where I’d spent the last ten years, and worst of all, we needed to give up my pet dog as a result.

My mother, sister, brother, and myself were sort of homeless for a year, split up living with various family members while we waited for an apartment of our own. Everything I owned (that was left after a lot of it was literally thrown in a dumpster) was piled in some storage unit. I distinctly remember feeling extremely lost and unmoored, and needing something to anchor me and take me away for a bit. I drove to that storage unit and dug through literal piles of shit just to find my paperback copy of this book, so I could read it repeatedly until I felt better.

I found a home in that book, and despite all the weirdness surrounding JKR lately (not going into it because despite disagreeing with her 100% I feel like it’s a more nuanced topic than people think and I’m not getting in some argument with some self-appointed moral police officers), I will never not be grateful for this book, and the series itself, giving me a home when I didn’t have one, and a home to come back to whenever I felt a bit like I was floating in space.

As for the third book…

There have been a million and one books outside of the two listed above that I’ve loved, but I don’t think anything has really affected me quite as deeply. However, if I’m forced to pick, it would probably have to be

The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

I think part of loving a book is that it’s easy to pick up and re-read whenever. I’d be lying if I said this was one of those books. It’s not that it’s difficult to understand or anything like that, just that it’s a commitment I don’t always have time for. It’s not one of those things you can just breeze through; it demands your full attention.

I read this for the first time just prior to Fellowship coming out in theaters. I was committed to finishing it before it did, and honestly it was something I’d always wanted to read but was intimidated by, and the movie honestly gave me the push I needed.

It took me three months to finish. I took my time. I had a Tolkien encyclopedia with me so I could look up anything I was confused about. I diligently poured over the appendices to make sure I was getting the pronunciations right in my head. I was a near Stephen Colbert level expert by the time I was done and I felt as comfortable bitching about movie missteps (there weren’t many) as anybody who’d been reading this for years. I was in it.

I can’t say that the book changed my life, but what it did do was fully immerse me in a reading experience, such that I’ve never felt before. At the end of those three months, I really felt every step of Frodo’s journey, so much so that I cried like a baby when it was done. Not to diminish the experience of amputees, but it felt what I imagined phantom limb feels like, having lived with something so consistently for months on end and to have it be over in the blink of an eye. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt a book as deeply since then, but then again, nothing has really demanded my attention and focus in the way this has. I’ve never encountered a fantasy world as fully realized as Middle Earth, and I challenge you to do the same – and if you do happen to find one, I will wager my soul that whoever created it counts Tolkien as their #1 influence.