THE SECRET COUNTRY

I kicked off this year’s reading with The Secret Country by Pamela Dean. My favorite book when I was 15 (and one that I still frequently reread) was Dean’s Tam Lin, kind of an eggheaded fantasy novel about fantastically bright and well-read liberal-arts college students. (This book, plus Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, formed all of my expectations about college, and I consequently spent my freshman year totally disillusioned by the discovery that my classmates were not all beautiful, brilliant, charismatic people who read Greek and quoted Keats at the drop of a hat. I somehow managed to overlook the fact that the genius Classics majors in Tartt’s book commit two murders, while in Dean’s book the Classics department is run by faeries who lure undergrads into their web of illusions and sterile immortality, and occasionally sacrifice them to hell.) There’s something I love about her Shakespeare-influenced writing style and her prickly, intelligent characters, but she’s only written a handful of other books, and they can be hard to find. The Secret Country trilogy had been out of print, but it’s been recently reissued and appeared at my library, so I warily checked it out. And it’s pretty good—it’s the kind of fantasy I like, grounded in the real world but with fantastic elements, a la Harry Potter, Madeleine L’Engle, etc. Actually, it’s very similar to the Narnia books in that ordinary children are transported to a magical world, only in these books, it’s a world they invented while playing make-believe, and now they find themselves living the stories they made up and acted out, and trying to figure out how it works and what they can change and (of course) how they can get home again. I promptly ordered the whole trilogy from Amazon, which then proceeded to torment me by sending me the third book (The Whim of the Dragon) this week, and not shipping the second one (The Hidden Land), which I am eagerly waiting to read, until next week.

Meanwhile, I’m reading an amusing time-travel novel, Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog. As the title implies, it contains a lot of references to Three Men and a Boat, which I now totally want to reread, in addition to reading more Connie Willis. I don't know whether to find it fun or maddening the way one book keeps leading to another...and another...and when will I ever get to War & Peace at this rate?