Fantastic Metropolis

I envy the confidence of those who regularly write “best of” articles. Their tone convinces me that they have read everything that could possibly be considered worth reading, and are presenting the rest of us with a list of only the finest, the works truly worth our time. I would completely believe them, too—their confidence is so compelling—if they didn’t always seem to include at least one work I found unreadable or to omit the piece that curled up in a corner of my soul and refused to move out.

So I shall not pretend to that level of confidence. While I am quite sure that everything I mention below is well worth reading, I am also sure that there are many other gems in my ever-growing pile of unread books, not to mention others that I have yet to discover. And it’s just possible that I’ve mislaid a few that I did read.

The books and stories below are the ones that made a lasting impression on me. Since I’m permanently behind in my reading, many of these were published prior to 2003. However, all of them are currently in print. If something listed below does not have a date, it was published prior to 2003.

I found myself obsessed with one anthology and one author in 2003. The anthology is The Poets’ Grimm: 20^th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales, edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson (2003). I originally bought this book not out of any great desire to read poems based on fairy tales—I read poetry sporadically and have never considered myself to be someone interested in fairy tales—but because it included poems by my friend Anne Sheldon. So of course, my first act was to read her poems, which were quite good, as I already knew.

But then I began reading some of the other works and was completely hooked. Part of the quality is simply good writing; the poets in this book are both highly skilled in their use of words and unafraid to get to the heart of the matter. However, the sheer power of the fairy tales themselves contributes greatly to this work. In particular, the poems by women (and women poets make up about eighty percent of the collection) hit me in the gut; I have begun to theorize that a woman cannot approach a fairy tale without having either a very personal or very feminist reaction. The poems by men tended toward either social commentary or something a bit more romantic—well worth reading, but not as gut-wrenching.

I’ve dragged this book around with me, found an excuse to recommend it to all sorts of people, and figured out that there’s a reason why fairy tales have hung around so long. Don’t make excuses like “I don’t read poetry” or “I don’t like fairy tales.” Just go read it.

My other obsession was the work of Virginia Woolf. This started harmlessly enough: I decided that if I were going to see the movie “The Hours,” I should read the book at its heart. So I picked up Mrs. Dalloway, and it knocked me on my ass. Woolf’s ability to both understand and convey the completely different characters in that book seemed almost uncanny. After that I read Orlando, which is delightful fantasy (and very funny), and some of her essays. And ploughed my way through Hermione Lee’s biography, which is quite dispassionate and useful for putting Woolf’s work in context. I doubt that I am through with this obsession, and in my zeal, I want to bring others along. If you haven’t read Woolf yet, do it soon.

So much for the books that led me into obsession. Here are some others that moved me greatly in the last year, for various reasons.

Novels

Sister Noon, by Karen Joy Fowler. By rendering non-judgmentally the sexism and racism, not to mention the silly opinions and assumptions, of late Victorian San Francisco, Fowler makes their idiocy obvious, and leaves the reader with the uncomfortable feeling that many of the ideas we currently hold dear will look equally foolish in a hundred years.

There and Back Again, Wild Angel, and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell, by Pat Murphy (with help from Max Merriwell and Mary Maxwell). Just damn good fun, with nods to classics in our genres, odd bits of history, and some interesting physics thrown in. Read them in the above order—they’re great on their own, but the overall effect is even better.