Having just read Fire and Hemlock, I am at the point in my reading cycle where I generally find that after reading a Diana Wynne Jones book that no other book can please me except another Diana Wynne Jones book.  Other books feel a bit stale in comparison.

It’s my personal sort of addendum to Jenny’s Law.  Diana Wynne Jones is better on a reread, and rereading Diana Wynne Jones is guaranteed to send me on a fervent spiral of Diana Wynne Jones rereads.

But I am thrilled to announced that this is not the case today!  Because I just read The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner, and I am in love.  I want to shout it from the rooftops!  I am slobbering with anticipation to read the sequels, and I find that I can’t pick up the other books on my TBR list because I’m that excited to pick up The Queen of Attolia on Thursday.  Right now I’m struggling with the choice of rereading Stardust or Tamora Pierce’s Street Magic.  I might pick up The Greengage Summer instead.  These are the only books I have with me today.  I stuffed Tamora Pierce in my bag days ago in a fit of nostalgia.  (I suffer from an extreme case of nostalgia.  This is why I do considerably more rereading than, I believe, the average reader.)

Yesterday was May Day!  I forgot all about it the night before, and didn’t remember to wake up early to bathe in May dew or any such thing, but I did pick a sprig of rosemary and wear it in my hair, and put on a green man pendant.  (Yes, I am a completely unbiased folklorist and anthropologist.)  I read the first chapter of Howl’s Moving Castle, my personal May Day tradition, as it was the first place I ever heard of such a thing as a May Day.

Today I am suffering from a post-performance hangover.  My bellydance troupe performed last night, and when I woke up this morning I found a trail of glitter and mascara from my pillowcase leading out to my car.  Inside my car it looks as though a drag queen with a fondness for Venetian fringe and vintage rhinestone appliques  suffered some unspeakable catastrophe.  I can feel glitter in my tear ducts.  Occasionally, weeks after a performance is over and done with, I’ve found traces of glitter in my fella’s beard.

I have never attended this thing called a Dragon*Con, though I live no-so-far from Atlanta.  I should go, or so say several friends who ought to know about these things.  I may have to this year, because two of my young-adulthood favorite writers will be holding a writer’s workshop there.  Aaron Allston and Michael A. Stackpole, from my middle school days of endlessly reading Star Wars novels!  Aaron Allston, whose character of Lieutenant Kettch, Ewok fighter pilot, made me laugh uproariously, and Michael A. Stackpole, whose Rouge Squadron books were the ones I searched for anxiously on the shelf at the school library.  And now, the chance to meet my childhood idols!  It is an irresistible temptation, since far too many of my childhood idols are now dead.

It’s like Meggie in Inkheart, who assumes that all writers are a perished race, until she meets a living one and realizes that she could be a writer someday, too.  I’ve got a sort of forlorn, nagging hope that I might be, in fact, a writer, and that this might explain some things about me, and it might be nice to see what real writers are like, in the event that one day I join their ranks.

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“A mild sort of orgy:” Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, part 1

October is here and I am staring a certain book in the face, as it were.  I have been carrying my battered copy in my bag for two weeks now, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to open it up again until I knew for certain that autumn was here in its crimson and brown and blood-red glory.  

Seven years ago, in the middle of the summer between my high school graduation and my first semester of college, a high school friend told me to come over to her house.  There was a trailer in her backyard that she was in the middle of cleaning out, and she invited me to ransack the trailer with her and take home some books.  I remember that I picked up, among others, an omnibus edition of The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and Pullman’s Lyra novels.  There was another book I grabbed, a filthy paperback with a bent spine and a Thomas Canty cover, that I picked up solely because I recognized Terri Windling’s name on the front.

Seven years ago, the only books I’d ever read about college had been Anne of the Island and Daddy-Long-Legs.  I had been trying very hard not to think too much about starting college in the fall, though I already knew I was going to be an English major: my stated ambition was to be an editor at a publish company, but secret desire was to write Star Wars Extended Universe novels like Aaron Allston. 

At some point in those last few weeks before college, I picked up Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin.  I remember starting the book in the late afternoon and finishing it sometime well after midnight because I couldn’t sleep until I’d finished.  The next morning, I woke up and started the book all over again.  I read it a third time a month into my first semester at college, just to see how my experience measure up to Janet’s.  After that I lost count of how many times I’d read it, but I do remember rereading it while working the night shift at a fast food restaurant the next summer, reading chapters on my break at 4:30 in the morning.  The image of the sunrise over the interstate is woven into words and pages.

Tam Lin means more to me than any other book in the wide world, and I am about to slip between its pages once again.

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