I wonder where to begin. Perhaps with the earliest distinct memory I have of reading a book on my own: it was a picture book of the Three Billy Goats Gruff story, and what I remember most are the pictures in the background: the detailed little houses in the hills – the way the depth of the illustrations drew you into a world larger than a story of three goats outsmarting a troll. The pictures showed a world people seemed to really live in: people behind the orange rectangles of those evening windows, having dinners and knitting, telling their own stories around the hearth.
That, for me, was always what I was looking for in a book: to be drawn into a world. To lose myself in its depths, imagine myself there, in those pages.
I was very lucky to have a mother who taught me to love books from an early age, so that my memories of reading seamlessly extend back to and mingle with my memories of anything at all. I always lived with, within, through, and among books. I remember reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and drawing my own plans, afterward, of the undersea vessel my friends and I would use to explore the depths. I remember reading The Time Machine and then lying awake at night, horrified by the depths of time Wells depicted. I remember reading Fahrenheit 451 and being able to feel the rain on my face, to see the leaves turning color during that autumn walk that begins to crack apart the fireman’s world.
And I remember the local library, which I entered with excitement every time I visited, searching among the racks and stacks for something new. Stephen King, Michael Moorcock, J.R.R. Tolkien, yes – but also Harper Lee, E.M. Forster, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was an omnivorous reader, and looking back I am grateful for it: I consumed Shakespeare plays alongside Cujo, followed Where the Red Fern Grows with Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – and was never limited or questioned in what I read.
Reading was a sacred space: what was important to my mother was not what I read, but the act of reading itself. And that is what I have taken away from that childhood filled with books of the most disparate types: not to judge according to genre, but instead to treat every book as an opportunity to enter a new world. A gateway into a pocket universe.
Like any voracious reader, I find it almost impossible for me to answer the question of which books made me – which are my favorites, or which are most formative. Instead, I would say this: Books made me. Books I searched for in the card catalog, and books I accidentally discovered on the shelf above what I was looking for in the library stacks. Books assigned by professors, and books I found in the university bookshop, assigned to classes I didn’t have time to take. Books I saved up for from the local bookshop, and books found in a cardboard box on the sidewalk marked free. Books eagerly anticipated, and books remaindered and forgotten. Books received as presents from people who had dogeared them and curved their spines, and books received as presents from people who had not ever bothered to read them themselves.
When I came to write my own book, they were all there for me to return to: all the books I had sought out, along with all the books that had found me by chance. From Shakespeare’s Tempest to Jesper Hoffmeyer’s Signs of Meaning in the Universe to The Phantom Tollbooth. A thousand pocket universes, from Frankenstein to Faust, to draw from, when I sat down to bring my own little world, The Mountain in the Sea, into existence. I am grateful to every single one of them.