Day 23

A picture of my favorite book. I ran a contest similar to what I did for Day Thirteen in my head: I visualized my way through my library, and decided that the most well-loved book would be the winner.  My poor copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany has been falling apart since our first reading over thirteen years ago.  If you could leaf through it - carefully please - you'd actually see my relationship with the text in margin notes, asterisks and underscores.  I really wish I could take that picture and show it to you.

Unfortunately a) I'm not at home, and b) when I considered the rules of the contest, I hadn't considered copies that were so well-loved I'd had to replace them.  And when I considered that lofty criterion, One Book rose to mind.  If I were given to punning I'd call it - One Book...to Rule Them All:

In December 2001, my Tolkien-lore was limited to the doings of Mr. Bilbo Baggins of The Shire.  I'd had no interest in the further adventures of his friends until I was suckered in by the majesty of Peter Jackson's feature-length rendition of the first installment of this saga.  (We have long since invested in the Extended-Edition of all three films for twelve hours of Tolkieny goodness.)  What I found in Tolkien's magnum opus redefined "majesty" in both its scope and its magnificence.
I read The Lord of The Rings as its author originally intended - as a single work, divided into six books, with thick appendices written in what I believe Wikipedia's watchdogs would call an 'in-universe style' for that extra dose of immersion into the saga of all the denizens of Middle Earth.  All of that context, and the level of back-story left untold was palpable.  So I went futher back, and read The Silmarillion.

This is what I ask of my fiction: a classic hero's quest, told with relative originality but still tied to form in a way that would make Campbell's ghost giggle like a delighted Lipton.  Irving did that for me, with Meany; Tolkien has done it over and over again with the saga of Middle Earth and its surrounding lands.

I am sorry I've been remiss in my posting lately; my poor health made it very difficult to reach a pair of school deadlines which of course must comprise my top priority.  I'm going to try to build up a buffer again.