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.

That may be what impressed me most. 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.