Something weird happened to me with the book Among Others, by Jo Walton. After that first glorious reading, I did a thing I do with the books that speak to me most, and dived back in for an immediate reread. And …. it didn’t work for me at all the second time through, it just didn’t feel like a place that mattered to me. I can’t remember that ever happening before with a book I’d loved. I didn’t write about it at the time, because I didn’t want to seem to be belittling a book I’d loved, because I didn’t understand why it happened, and because I figured it had more to do with me than with the book.
I read it again the other day, for the third time, and was relieved to find that it worked for me again. It wasn’t so much Mori’s immersion in books that did it for me this time directly; it was more the second-order effects that connected for me. Actually what I noticed most this time was the sex, or rather, the way she thinks about sex. The way Mori thinks about sex is almost exactly the way I did at 15. (In some areas, I still do, though I’ve changed opinions in others.) And that makes sense, because I’d read most of Heinlein by then too, though not Delany. The sex in Among Others is about being 15 and having it all to think through – of course it has to be given a fifteen-year-old girl in 1979 – but it’s also about how you think about big things in general when you see that world largely through a lens of books, and more specifically SFF books.
I’m glad the book connected for me this time through. It’s funny, because in some ways I read the book and I see me in Mori, but then if I think about it, in other ways she is as foreign and remote to me as a Tey character (Brat Farrar is far more alien to me than many a character she on another planet). She’s got an entirely different culture and different influences and experiences that I”ve had, and she’s got that quality of observing from the outside that makes it clear how she grew up to be a writer. But there are also the books we have in common, and some common ways of thinking that they engender. This was the reading where I saw both sides.