Magic

Sheila Viehl mentions a short article in NewsDay about what the books we read says about us, and I was thinking about just that very thing the past couple of days. Not in the greater sense of what it says about a society, but about what it says about me.

Sheila sent me a couple of books for Christmas, both of them by Charles de Lint, books which I had listed on my Amazon.com wish list as being ones that I wanted to own (and which prompted Bob to say, "She sent you books by a different author??", i.e., not herself).

One of the books was Angel of Darkness, an early book of de Lint's which he wrote under the name of Samuel M. Key. The other one was Tapping the Dream Tree, a collection of short stories. I hadn't read either of them yet because I felt like I sort of had to be in the mood. Angel of Darkness is horror, and de Lint said somewhere that it is the darkest thing he's ever written, so I've been a little hesitant to read it.

My book reading habits go in spells, I think. Sometimes I read a lot of British detective fiction, for instance, or American "hard boiled" detective fiction, and sometimes I'm in the mood for more mainstream "women's" fiction, like Anne Tyler or Alice Hoffman, and sometimes I'm in the mood for urban fantasy. I guess I was in the mood for urban fantasy this week, because I picked up Tapping the Dream Tree, and I'm really loving it.

I had assumed that, since the book was a collection of short stories, I would probably have read most of them at some point, but I haven't recognized one yet, which is amazing. And all of the stories I've read so far are wonderful. I think if I had to name one author that I would like to emulate more than any other, it would be de Lint. His books are full of magic--there are girls that turn into crows and fly away, and a man who used to be a buffalo, music that calls spirits to you, and talking dogs--but you can also log on to the internet, and have a job in an architectural firm, and walk down the street and buy a beer.

I like the juxtaposition of magic and the "real" world--what's real, and what isn't? What might just possibly be real?

I'm looking very much forward to reading de Lint's newest book, Spirits in the Wires, which will be released in August. It's all about magic, again, but this time the magic is the magic of the internet and the spirits that live there now. There's an extended excerpt available at de Lint's site.

An odd notion came into my head. I had a sudden impression of some other place, a pixelated realm that lay somewhere in cyberspace--that mysterious borderland of electrons and data pulses that exists in between all the computers that make up the World Wide Web. I could almost see this deep forest of sentences and words secreted in a nexus of the Web, and as I did, I sensed some enormous entity swelling up out of it, a leviathan of impossible proportions that had no physical presence, but it did have a vast and incomprehensible soul.

The only thing I dislike about Tapping the Dream Tree is that a quarter of it is Seven Wild Sisters, and the only reason that makes me unhappy is that I already own that book in its independent form (Misty gave me a copy autographed by both de Lint and the illustrator, Charles Vess), so Tapping the Dream Tree isn't nearly as long as it would at first appear to be.

Another series of books in which magic intersects with the real world is, of course, the Harry Potter universe. I'm listening to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in the car this week, and it's making me really anxious for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which comes out next month. I've resorted to reading Harry Potter Fan Fiction . . .

There's a total lunar eclipse tonight (Thursday, May 15). If it isn't cloudy, we should be able to see the moon turn red as the Earth's shadow passes between the moon and the sun. It's the first eclipse of 2003. Here's an interesting explanation of how it works.