Fantastic Metropolis

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios

Tim Feeney

I think that most readers have experiences like these, but they tend to be difficult to convey—it’s not easy to describe the charged joy of finding a book you’ve been after for years, or of coming across a favorite author’s latest work, or of discovering a rarity priced far below what you’d normally have to pay for it. Stories like these tend to come off sounding sort of geeky. I think many of us identify with the general experiences, but unique tastes dictate that the particulars—i.e., each of our favorite books and authors—end up being very personal. Like reading in general, come to think of it.

Jeffrey Ford

I remember a book I had as a child of 6 or 7 that had a little story about this family of children for each day of the year—365 stories. I read the corresponding story each date at night before I went to sleep. The illustrations in it were beautiful and I felt like I was living two lives, my own and the world of the fictional family. I don’t know if I have ever felt more deeply part of a book as when that year was done.

Karen Joy Fowler

As a child I fell in love with a book called The Green Poodles. I checked it out of the library every other week and read it over and over until one Christmas my parents gave me my own copy to keep. Three months later I’d brought it home from the library again. I’d been watching over it in the interim and no one had checked it out. I thought it was probably feeling lonely and unappreciated. My parents were amused, but, now that I’m a writer, I think I was merely prescient. There are a lot of lonely books out there and some of them are mine.

Neil Gaiman

I remember one evening, there was just me and a copy of Lives of the Great Poisoners, and I had poured the tea and lit the jasmine scented candles, and it was obvious that the blind chaperone would soon fall asleep to the hum of the cicadas. And the way that book curled its pages at me, I knew we were both interested in the same thing. There were weasels, questing through the shrubbery, something which would normally have attracted my interest, but now… Er, better make that “no” as well.

Stephen Gallagher

As a child I bought used books from a stall on the Saturday market in Eccles, near my home in the northwest of England. It was a dirt-cheap treasure trove, marred only by the pricing practice of the owner—she’d snip off the top corner of a paperback cover and write her price in ink on the uncovered page beneath. I used to gum new corners onto the books and paint them in an attempt to match the jacket art.

Theodora Goss

As a child, I was read stories from a book of Hungarian fairy tales, with the somber, modernist illustrations in browns, blues, and purples then in fashion. They gave me nightmares for years. Today, the book is hidden between The New Junior Classics in ten volumes and The White Stag. When I take it out, I still shiver.

M. John Harrison

My whole life is a memory connected to books. But it’s too long to share and too idiosyncratic to be of use to anyone else.

Rhys Hughes

One utterly egocentric memory. Receiving a copy of my own first published book through the post and standing with it in my hands, pacing the room and imagining how other people might read it. Turning the pages until I became mesmerized and exasperated with my words and the titles of my stories, alternating between pride and embarrassment, foolishly imagining that fame was an imminent possibility. And already turning down phantom invitations to parties in my honor, because I didn’t know what to say or how to guess champagne accurately. Delighted and anxious at the same time, and pathetically unaware that the hordes of beautiful females who are desperate to throw themselves at published writers don’t in fact exist. Or rather that they do exist but are writing and publishing their own books elsewhere and have no need to throw themselves anywhere other than at themselves.