How Does a Book Change You?

How can a book transform a reader into a new person, as so many books I have read have done? It is palpable, this change, this growth, and you know somehow at the finish of a book that there has been some molecular change in you, and that you will never be the person you were before.

Of course, in some cases a book calls to some inner being and draws it out, setting you on a path you will follow for some time, if not all your life. Though not a book, the British series, The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Richard Greene and Alan Wheatley , accomplished my transformation when I was about six or seven years old. I don't recall any interest in the Middle Ages before that, but once I reflected in the series something elemental and part of me, I was irrevocably changed. I quite literally never was the same again. Perhaps the series did not change me but simply pulled something out, something already part of my DNA. I don't know where that would have been born, but that's a topic for anther conversation.  Somehow the influence has continued to have an impact, not only in favorite subjects, but my personality, my values. I have gone on with my life with an everpresent WWRHD? way of dealing with the world.

That series, and books like Elizabeth Linington's The Proud Man, which tuned me in as did The Fighting Prince of Donegal, a Disney movie, turned my steps, already on the road, in a particular direction, i.e. Ireland. But so many other books have had more subtle, more, shall we say, visceral effects. The one that comes to mind most forcefully for me is a relatively recently read series, Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. The first volume alone, The Game of Kings, left me stunned, breathless, blown away by the complexity of the main character, the emotional impact of his journey. How did it change me? It added what I might call a vivid new thread in the weave of my psyche. Just having met Lymond makes me a more richly complex person. Nor is this particular transformation complete. This book, this series will go on sculpting me anew.

I could probably more easily count the books that have not had at least some transformative impact on that weave that is the innermost me. The particular thread is different with each. Ruth Sims' The Phoenix, Brandy Purdy's The Confession of Piers Gaveston, Morgan Llywelyn's The Lion of Ireland are just three of the books where the sense of molecular shift was most pronounced. It is like having had these characters in my head and heart made me more than one person. The same goes for Sharon Kay Penman's Welsh novels, Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning, where it feels like several souls now crowd together within me. The Heaven Tree trilogy by Edith Pargeter, though not my favorite books, had moments in them that froze me for a time.

I wish I could articulate this with more precision, but perhaps you will help me? I would like to hear from you, either directly or, preferably, in the Comments to this post, whether you have had this sense of being jarred into a new reality by certain books, and how you might express what I have tried to.

And of course, I want to hear what books did this to you, why and how.

C'mon, Nan... Give!

OK, OK, OK -- it ain't easy to see what the images from that yarn painting are supposed to be.. and the larger the magnification the more obscure they are. I appreciate notes from Bernard Cornwell, Susan Higginbotham and Helen Hollick expressing pleasure to have been included in the "painting" but I suspect they were being generous.

So here are detailed explanations of the images nd the books they represent.

Hopefully you can see the numbers... there is an extra 6 - ignore it.

1.  This is a black king chesspiece, honoring the chess theme of Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond sries and intended to represent the final volume, Checkmate.

2.  A white pawn,, for Dunnett's Pawn in Frankincense.

3.  A lemon flying through the air.  In The Toss of a Lemon, the father asks the midwife to throw a lemon out the window at the precise moment of his children's births so he can create an astrology chart.

4.  Two images from Margaret George's Helen of Troy: in the foreground, a sacred snake biting its own tale, and behind it the Trojan horse.

5.  A red and white rose to honor both families in Susan Higginbotham's Wars of the Roses novel, The Stolen Crown.

6.  A Russian orthodox church dome in honor of Lymond's stay in Ivan the Terrible's empire in Dunnett's The Ringed Castle.

7.  Jesamiah Acorne's lethal blue hair ribbon in Helen Hollick's pirate adventures starting with Sea Witch.

8.  A globe  representing the search for Prester John's kingdom in Umberto Eco's Baudolino.

9.  My own novel in progress.  a shield with an upside-down duck on it.  You will have to read the novel when it comes out to see what that was all about!

10.  A scafffold and headsma's ax, one of several from Brandy Purdy's The Boleyn Wife, published in England as The Tudor Wife by Emily Purdy.

11.  A Napoleon ic Imperial Eagle from any of the Bernard Cornwell Richard Sharpe's  Adventure Series, in particular Sharpe's Eagle.  It was this image in gold I started this yarn painting with.

12. A shoe, from one of the stories in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

13. Three men and a woman in a canoe with affectionate reference to the main characters from Kathleen O'Neal and W. Michael Gear's People of the Lakes.  They are, left to right, Black Skull, Green Spider - a contrary, sitting backwardsand holding up a mask - Pearl and Otter. 

You can see the color image on this post.

HTH.

Can You Identify the Books?

I like to do what I call "yarn paintings" of images suggested by books I am listening to, whether on the library for the blind's cassettes or downloads, my Kindle 2, or my husband reading to me. 
The one below is my latest.  I included a few books I had read recently but had not put into another yarn painting.  Click on the image for a larger view or visit the image and a black and white key on my Flickr pages to it to see if you identified all the books in the list below.

Key:

1. Checkmate, Dorothy Dunnet
2. Pawn in Frankincense, Dorothy Dunnet
3. The Toss of a Lemon, Padna Viswanathan
4.Helen of Troy, Margaret George
5.The Stolen Crown, Susan Higginbotham
6. The Ringed Castle, Dorothy Dunnet
7. Sea Witch series, Helen Hollick
8.Baudolino, Umberto Eco
9. My own current work in progress
10. The Boleyn Wife, Brandy Purdy
11. Richard Sharpe's Adventures series, Bernard Cornwell
12. Collected Stories of I. B. Singer, I. B. Singer
13.People of the Lakes, Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear

Have fun... and get your book on the next yarn painting!

I'm a Recorded Songwriter!

I never thought when I was fifteen and listening to Donovan that someday I would be a songwriter with a recorded song!

As of today, I am just that.  Druidsong, a marvelous Celtic artist, has recorded my song "The Ballad of Rory McGuinness" which I wrote about 43 uears ago to be a song "by" my novel's Shannon O'Neill about an event that takes place in the course of the novel, An Involuntary King: A Tale of Anglo Saxon England - see right.

The current lyrics are more recent, and the melody has been arranged by Druidsong for his own performance.  The song will be on his upcoming album, due out sometime in June.  I, of course, will gleefully play the track on my Celtic radio station, Radio Dé Danann!

In the meantime you can listen to and purchase a download of this ballad at http://druidsong.bandcamp.com/ .

This just might be one of my top ten most exciting moments of my life!

Then if after you have heard the song, you want to know what really happened to Rory, buy my book!  It's available on Amazon.com, Kindle and on Smashwords.  It is also available for the print impaired reader in text and Braille output formats at BookShare.org.

Audio Conversation with Author Margaret George

Margaret George, author of such beloved historical novels as:

• The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
• The Memoirs of Cleopatra: A Novel
• Mary Queen of Scotland & The Isles: A Novel
• Mary, Called Magdalene

was a guest on AccessibleWoerld.org's  monthly historical fiction discussion to talk about her novel Helen of Troy and to answer our questions about this book, our May reading assignment.

Below is an audio recordingf that quite marvelous discussion.

Let's Read Historical Novels meets at 9 PM Eastern/6 PM Pacific on the first Tuesday of each month. You can find a list of our books and both a link to the chatroom -- you'll need a microphone -- and a sampling of the other time zones. In most the chat is actually on the first Wednesday of the month. The site is designed to be accessible for people with vision imapirment, but as with all such things, not just for people with disabilities. Anyone and everyone who can access the audio is more than welcome to join us.

Click to listen.

June's book is Louis L'Amour's The Walking Drum.

AccessibleWorld.org has audio chats on a wide variety of subjects.  Its book groups include A World View of History, the Romance Novels group, the Mystery Novels group, a science fiction group, and others.  Join for some the brightest and most engaged discussions on the Internet. 

Let's Read Historical Novels

But Why Did the Character DO that?

Have you ever been in the middle of a novel and wondered why an author had a character do, or not do, something that seemed either illogical or out of character?  Of course you have.  I recently have read two novels like this, and I know perfectly well I have something in An Involuntary King that fits this category. I just suggested my own strategy to an author, and I would like to share it here.

First I would like to describe the three instances I picked up on.

In Helen of Troy Helen, when her beloved Paris is dying from a poisoned arrow, forgets all about her lifelong friend, Gellinor, who just happens to be a poisons expert, runs all the way to the mountain to find Paris's ex-main squeeze to beg her to heal him -- she's a water nymph.  They can do those things..  I asked author Margaret George about this, and she explained that she was being true to the original story of The Iliad.  Understood, but after several hundred pages of Gellinor's smarts and knowing, as we do by then, that the nymph promised to turn her down when the day comes, I should think that Helen would at least have sent for Gellinor to look after Paris while she went so far away.

In Susan Higginbotham's The Traitor's Wife the male protagonist, Hugh le Dispenser, spends an afternoon in bed with King Edward II and then goes home to his wife.  Now, be honest, wouldn't you love to know what was going through his mind when he first encounters his wife?  "How was day at work, honey?"  There is nothing in the book about this.  I wrote to Susan and asked her about this omission.  She told me it had veen too long and she couldn't remember that much about the scene.

In my own novel, An Involuntary King, the character MacDhui helps first the man MacDhui's lover, O'Donnell, has condemned to hang for rejecting his advances, and later helps the queen and Shannon to escape over the river to Críslicland.  His motivation is never explicitly stated.  he would have every reason to betray the three, yet he chooses inexplicably to do the opposite.  Why?  The real reason is I just wanted the story to go that way.  I knew it was a very flawed bit of writing.

So what do you do when you realize you have done this in your novel?  Easy: you asked the reader who is quizzing you about it, "What do you think?  Why do you thing he or she did or did not do that or even just what he or she did?"  hey presto, you get to listen to a reader talk about your characters in a way that is exceedingly gratifying and you are off the hook.

Though neither George nor Higginbotham asked me, I decided to give an answer.  For Helen I said she either knew Gellinor was not there or perhaps was just so upset she did the dumbest thing.  Or perhaps she doubted Gellinor's skill more than she lets on.  With Hugh le Dispenser I told the author that what I imagined would have happened is that he would come home, and in order to prove something to himself, he would have SO made love to his wife.

I actually have an answer for MacDhui.  I only came up with it later, partly helped by how reader's interpreted the situation.  I decided that he felt sorry for Rory, was a little grateful the man had not responded positively to O'Donnell's seduction, and acted out of understanding and decency.  Then when Rory's friends show up, he does what he can to sweep them and the whole topic under the rug by getting them out of the country.  Well, it's not a good reason, but it's a reason.

So I hope these two authors and the rest of you will remember when a reader says, "Why the heck did so and so not...?" just to answer, "What do you think?"

My Latest Search Results

If Google's webbbots can predict trends, and that's all they can do, friends, not predict the future, then mayhap the sort of searches with pich eople find my blogs is indicative of what The Inquiring Minds out there are intrigued by... or not. Anyway, here are some of the latest on my recently sparse but soon to be re energized blog.

thoughts on first person narrative

There were several versions of this phrase. I suppose this means that they all know now that I have some.

a noun or event from the middle ages

Umm.. how about "varlet"? And for the event, Prince Edward, later known as the Black Prince, loses his first tooth.

Tribal Tattoo letters

A work, no doubt, of great epistolary excellence.

nan hawthorne riddles

No doubt there are numerous. However, I don't know the answers to them any more than you do.

what happened to atlantis

Don't look at me! I had nothing to do with it.

books on the middle ages

You don't mean the middle aged do you?

You notice no one searched for "search words funnier than susan higginbotham's".  That is no riddle... it's because you can't find those on my blogs.