On My Shelf

I discovered The Dresden Files during the pandemic, when I was looking for a long series I could disappear into for a while. I started with the audiobooks and very quickly became attached to Harry Dresden himself.

What I loved most was simply spending time in Harry's world. I loved his basement apartment, the fireplace, the subbasement laboratory and all the little details of how he lived when he wasn't out getting himself into trouble. I loved Bob the Skull, Mister the cat, and eventually Mouse, the enormous dog who became part of Harry's wonderfully unconventional household.

I've kept up with the series ever since and own every book in one form or another, some in more than one.

There are bigger, stranger and more spectacular places in The Dresden Files. But if I could visit one of them, I'd still choose that old basement apartment—with Bob on the shelf, Mister somewhere nearby, and Mouse taking up far more room than any dog reasonably should.

I discovered Edgar Allan Poe in seventh-grade literature class. I no longer remember everything we read, but I remember exactly how two of his stories made me feel.

The Pit and the Pendulum and The Cask of Amontillado filled me with dread.

Not simply fear. Dread. That awful feeling in the pit of your stomach—no pun intended—when you know something terrible is coming and the story makes you stay there and wait for it.

Those stories have stayed with me ever since.

I now own Poe's collected works, although I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I haven't read every one of them. I keep returning to his short fiction. There's something about the darkness of it, the atmosphere, and the way he can make impending horror feel almost physical that still intrigues me.

More than anything, I remember the feeling. After all these years, Poe can still put it right back in the pit of my stomach.

I grew up watching the old black-and-white Frankenstein movies, so naturally I thought Frankenstein was the monster. I also thought I understood the story: the monster was the bad guy, everyone was terrified of him, and eventually somebody needed to destroy him.

Then I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

The first surprise, of course, was discovering that Frankenstein wasn't the monster's name. The much bigger surprise was discovering how sorry I felt for the creature.

He didn't make himself. He didn't choose what he looked like or the circumstances of his existence. He was brought into the world and then left to make sense of it while being judged by everyone who saw him. That didn't make everything he did right, but it made it impossible for me to see him simply as the monster anymore.

That's what has stayed with me. Mary Shelley took a character I thought I understood completely and made me question who the monster really was.

I've had a weakness for complicated monsters ever since.

Ninth House came to me as a recommendation, and I'm not sure I would have chosen it on my own. It turned out to be a real page-turner.

What stayed with me most, though, was Alex Stern.

I didn't like her.

At least, I didn't like her at first. There was something about her that kept me at a distance, and I wasn't particularly sure I wanted to spend an entire book with her. Then, somewhere along the way, that changed. The more I learned about Alex, the more I understood her, and eventually I found myself genuinely caring about what happened to her.

I think that's one of the things a really good book can do. It doesn't always have to give you a character you immediately love. Sometimes it asks you to stay with someone long enough to discover why you should care.

Ninth House did that for me.

I first read Jim Bishop's The Day Christ Died in seventh grade, when my entire class was assigned the book. It follows the final hours of Christ's life and brings the events leading to the Crucifixion down to an almost hour-by-hour account.

You already know how the story ends.

That was what made the book so powerful for me. There was no wondering what was coming next, no possibility that somehow the ending might change. Instead, the book made me stay with Christ as the hours passed and confront, as closely as I could, what was physically happening to him.

Like some of the Poe stories I discovered around the same age, it gave me that feeling in the pit of my stomach. But this was different. This wasn't the dread of imagining what might happen.

It was the dread of knowing what would.

I owned Crime and Punishment for years without opening it. Yes, I am one of those people who has books on the shelf she hasn't read. Boo to me.

Dostoevsky intimidated me a little. It finally took a recommendation from someone much younger than I am to get me into it. He was already well ahead of me when I started, and suddenly I understood why this book had survived on other people's shelves for more than a century.

What gripped me wasn't the crime itself. It was the interiority.

Dostoevsky put me so completely inside Raskolnikov's mind that I wasn't observing his choices from a comfortable distance. I was inside the thinking that made them possible.

At one point, I had to put the book down. Not because I was bored or because it was difficult to read, but because I needed to settle something within myself before I was willing to go back into his head.

Dostoevsky didn't simply ask me to watch a character make choices I found disturbing. He made me inhabit the mind making them.

I wasn't prepared for that.

Perhaps that's why the book stayed with me long after I finally took it off the shelf.

My first great love affair was with a brilliant, emotionally unavailable man who lived at 221B Baker Street. He was eccentric, obsessive, occasionally insufferable, and had a cocaine habit.

Apparently, I developed questionable taste in men at a very early age.

Fortunately, Sherlock Holmes was fictional.

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where Friday nights meant The Big Chuck and Hoolihan Show. For those unfamiliar with this particular bit of Cleveland television history, it was a local program featuring old horror movies, B movies, and the sort of entertainment that could keep a teenager happily glued to the television long after she should have been asleep.

My parents would go to bed, and sometimes they let me stay up late. Those evenings were a special privilege, and I spent many of them in the company of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson.

I adored those old black-and-white mysteries. Charlie Chan was another favorite. I loved the atmosphere, the peculiar characters, the murders, and the satisfaction of watching an extraordinarily clever man untangle a mystery that had everyone else thoroughly baffled.

But Charlie Chan remained a television pleasure. Sherlock Holmes became something more.

I discovered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories and proceeded to read every single one. At some point, my then-husband gave me a beautiful multivolume collection of the complete Sherlock Holmes works. I believe there were six volumes. Whatever the number, I read them all.

And I kept coming back.

Of course, there was Basil Rathbone.

To this day, when I think of Sherlock Holmes on screen, I think of Rathbone. The sharp features, the commanding presence, the magnificent certainty with which he approached a problem. I've watched every one of his Holmes films that I could find, along with television adaptations, and I've never quite exhausted my appetite for another visit to Baker Street.

But a great deal of the pleasure has always been Dr. Watson.

Holmes may be the extraordinary intellect, but Watson gives us someone to love without reservation. He is loyal, decent, courageous, occasionally exasperated, and endlessly patient with a friend who is not always easy to endure. Their relationship is one of the great friendships in literature, and I suspect the stories would lose much of their charm without him.

There's also something wonderfully comforting about the world Conan Doyle created. The foggy London streets, the hansom cabs, the peculiar visitors arriving at Baker Street with impossible problems, Mrs. Hudson somewhere in the background, and Holmes waiting for something sufficiently interesting to rescue him from boredom.

Even knowing how a mystery ends doesn't diminish the pleasure of returning to it. In fact, I think that may be the mark of truly memorable fiction. Eventually, the solution becomes less important than the company.

As a writer, I find myself thinking about that more often. A clever plot can make someone turn the pages, but unforgettable characters make them return to a story they've already read.

Holmes is certainly unforgettable. Brilliant, arrogant, maddeningly observant, and sometimes astonishingly blind to the ordinary emotions of the people around him. And Watson, bless him, remains steadfast through it all.

I've loved these two gentlemen since I was a teenager sitting up late in Cleveland, long after my parents had gone to bed. Decades have passed, and the fascination hasn't diminished.

I suppose that's the advantage of falling in love with a fictional man.

He never grows older, never disappoints you by becoming someone else, and never complains when you disappear for a few years before returning.

And whenever I want to see him again, I know exactly where to find him.

221B Baker Street.

Watson will probably answer the door.