AMONG OTHERS

I’ve procrastinated in writing about this book because I don’t feel I can quite do justice to how much I adored it. I had enjoyed Jo Walton’s “Small Change” trilogy (Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown), so when I noticed she had a new book out, I snatched it up at the library. When I saw that it was a coming-of-age novel about a teenage girl at a British boarding school in the 1970s, I got excited. When I started it and realized that it was first and foremost a love letter to reading, I was smitten.

The narrator, Mori, has left her large, close-knit Welsh family for the custody of the English father she barely knows, who then sends her to a bleak boarding school where she is basically an outcast. The circumstances surrounding all this are initially mysterious, revealed slowly to the reader over the course of the book; all we know at first is that Mori has an injured leg, a twin sister who recently died, and an estranged mentally ill mother. Who is apparently a malevolent witch. Mori can do magic, too. Oh, and there are fairies.

If the mention of fairies scares you off (hell, it usually does that to me), let me say that one of the things I love about this book is how understated the fantasy elements are—so subtle that at times I half-wondered if they weren’t supposed to be real and Mori was just delusional (not so, but there are junctures where the book could have gone that way). Mori’s is an everyday sort of magic, and Walton interestingly restrains herself from turning the story into an epic good-and-evil battle. Sure, there’s a final confrontation, but the real point of book is Mori’s journey of self-discovery—and much of it happens through reading.

Mori is a science fiction addict, and the book is peppered with—in fact, since it is her diary, largely composed of—references to all the books she’s reading. Some of these (well, lots of them, considering I’m not a frequent sci-fi reader) are titles I’ve never read or even heard of; others are familiar (The Lord of the Rings is a touchstone), and some seem to be in-jokes put there just for my enjoyment. Having just finished my annual Dickens tome, I giggled at this one:

We’re reading Our Mutual Friend, which I secretly call Our Mutual Fiend. You could rewrite it with that title to make Rogue Riderhood the one they all know.

And even harder at this one, a misunderstanding of one of my all-time faves:

I bought Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle for 10p… I didn’t know she’d written any historical fiction. I’ll keep it until I’m in the mood for a good siege.

But it’s not just the specific books that make Mori a Kindred Spirit; it’s her ardent love of reading for its own sake:

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

Libraries really are wonderful. They’re better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.

…Eight books sounds (and feels) like a lot, but it isn’t as if they’ll last me all week. I normally read now in the early morning if I wake before the bell, for the three hours of compulsory games, during any boring classes, in prep after I’ve finished my prep, in the half-hour free time after prep, and for the half hour we’re allowed in bed before lights out. So I’m getting through a couple of books most days.

As a bonus, through Mori’s voracious reading, Walton manages to vividly evoke what it was to be a fangirl in the days before the Internet (not to mention a geek before geek was chic). This took me back to my childhood, when I had to rely on the ads in the back of book (remember those?) or the list of the author’s other works in the front as a springboard for future reading, and I was never sure whether I was actually reading a series in the correct order unless there were helpful volume numbers on the spine, and if my library didn’t have something or I couldn’t track it down at a bookstore I was just plain out of luck. I rely so much on online library catalogs, Amazon, Wikipedia, blogs, and author and publisher Web sites for book information now, but back then so much depended on chance, luck, and word of mouth—which is partially why I’m only just now managing to finish all the Betsy-Tacy and Madeleine L’Engle books in sequence. There was a heightened joy of discovery to pre-Internet book hunting, when you could suddenly happen upon a new-to-you book by your favorite author just sitting there on the shelf one day, but I don’t miss the accompanying agonies of uncertainty and incompleteness. Now I can track down copies of out-of-print books and have them sent to my house with a few clicks of the mouse, but in those days some things were just lost. Not to mention the potential loneliness of the solitary reader—nowadays Mori could connect to a million other like-minded fans through blogs and chat rooms, but in the book she’s an outsider (although, admirably, she never pities herself: “It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.”) until she finally finds a welcoming, compatible group of friends (and even first love, squee!) through the sci-fi group at her local library.

With its touch-of-magic-in the-real-world setting and highly literate protagonist, Among Others reminded me strongly of Tam Lin, one of my all-time nearest and dearest books. But whereas I recognize that Tam Lin is not for everyone, I believe (or want to) that Among Others is a must-read for any bookworm, especially anyone who’s ever felt like an oddball because of it. After all, its message, as Mori puts it, is irresistible: “If you love books enough, books will love you back.”