Fantastic Metropolis

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Milorad Pavić

The book you did not finish reading till the end is like a life without death.

Justina Robson

I once gave a copy of Dragonflight to my English Lit teacher in secondary school to show her that books besides Jane Eyre could be interesting, forgetting that my friend and I had written frankly rude remarks all through the margins of the “sexy” bits… On returning it, she masterfully made no comment but I imagine that she and her husband must have had a good laugh on us. I still have the copy and it brings a smile to my face every time I see it.

Luís Rodrigues

Several—books inevitably become impregnated with events in my life, and vice-versa. My oldest recollection has to do with memorising the contents of an entire storybook when I was two or three, before I even knew how to read. I then surprised and amused guests when I “read” the book aloud and even turned the pages accordingly, like I’d seen my Mother do when she read it to me at bedtime.

Lucius Shepard

I once killed an agouti with a book. I was on a bus in Guatemala, near Tikal, when an agouti scurried across the road. They are, apparently, good to eat. The bus driver slammed on the brakes and young Guatemalan men boiled out and chased it up an embankment and one slashed it with a machete. They stood around, congratulating each other on the kill. I got off the bus carrying my pack—I’d never seen an agouti up close. It was still alive and suffering. I’m not usually squeamish—I’ve seen a lot of dying things—but this affected me for some reason. I told the young guys they might want to finish the job, but they ignored me. I had a voluminous English-Spanish dictionary in my pack, which I used—end-first—to crush the agouti’s skull. The men were annoyed with me, but I was happy to endure their annoyance. The dictionary was a mess. I ditched it and got another in Huehuetenango a few days later.

Delia Sherman

When I was a child, I had asthma. There were many nights I couldn’t breathe well enough to sleep (inhalers hadn’t been invented yet), and during those nights, my father read to me from the Golden Book version of Howard Pyle’s The Adventures Of Robin Hood And His Merrie Men. It had pictorial board covers portraying a luridly green Robin shooting a luridly brown arrow with luridly red fletching at a most unconvincing tree. The paper was so cheap that it began to yellow and crack almost immediately (you ought to see it 45 years later), and the plates it was printed from were a bit worn, especially the Ford illustrations. But I loved it. Not just the stories (which my poor father read until he could practically recite them, Medievaloid English and all) and the pictures (which I pored over, smudged and fuzzy as they were), but the book itself, solid and smoky-smelling and pleasant to hold. I still have it, the spine reinforced with floral Contact paper and the pages dark tan and almost too brittle to turn. And I still read it, from time to time, when I can’t sleep.