Five Books to Know Me

I love a list. And I also love the social media tendency to meme lists and use them as ways to drive conversations (or, more cynically, engagement.) But as I mentioned last week, sometimes the problem with meme lists is that they are contextless. Five Books to Know Me doesn’t really let me introduce myself unless I am already certain that the person reading the list knows both the books I’ve chosen, and knows me well enough to know why I’ve chosen them.

I’ve been writing these posts for almost a year now. (I launched in October, but I had prepped enough to get started with.) There’s a couple hundred of you who subscribe (thank you, truly.) Thus, it feels sort of like time to introduce – or reintroduce – myself. Or at the very least to give in to my love of a list. (It is Virgo season, after all.)  

So here are five books to know me, with a bit of context as to why. They aren’t necessarily my five favorites, though I do like them all, so much as five books that I can see as having a meaningful effect on my life. I am presenting them in chronological order of reading.

The Grey King – Susan Cooper. I love all of her The Dark Is Rising series, but I initially read them out of order. Not on purpose, just because that was how I encountered them. This was the first one I read, and it remains my favorite. Those of you who know the books know that this is the one that engages most directly with the Arthurian mythos (though traces of it are all through the books.) I knew the King Arthur story, a bit. I’d seen the Disney The Sword in the Stone, knew the songs from Camelot. But this was the place where that story, Arthur’s story, got its hooks into me. This was the book that I read and read and read, and that eventually made me start chasing after pieces of the myth – checking out every version of any sort of King Arthur book I could find from the library in high school and then in college and then becoming a medievalist because I wanted to get closer to the oldest versions of the stories. And then, when I started writing, needing also to tell my own version of them.