Beyond Selidor

It's a cold day, and I've been floating around the house in two jumpers like some sort of tired tree creature, fuelled by coffee and reheated baked potatoes.

With today's post, we're a third of the way through the prompts for the thirty-day book meme:

10. A book that belongs to a specific time in your mind, caught in amber



I'm going to answer this not so much with a single book, but more with a specific subgenre of book. I've mentioned in previous posts that I find it really difficult to read 'Celtic'-inspired fantasy, and have done basically since I started my first postgraduate degree in the field — it just became impossible to read most books without being hugely irritated. (There are exceptions: the use of 'Celtic' mythology has to be so silly and superficial that it verges on cultural appropriation, like Holly Black's YA fairy otherworld stories that borrow the trappings of Irish fairies and stick them in a contemporary USian setting. Or, alternatively, it needs to be something that really digs into the bones of the mythology, like Deirdre Sullivan's Savage Her Reply, which I read earlier this year.)

But before I swore off reading this fantasy subgenre, I was all. over. it. I didn't meet a 'Celtic' fantasy novel that I didn't read and adore. O.R. Melling. Juliet Marillier. Cecilia Dart-Thornton (I mean, my book reviews blog is even named for one of the gates into the fairy otherworld in Dart-Thornton's first trilogy of novels, mangled Irish and all). Marion Zimmer Bradley, for my sins. If there was a vague whiff of Arthuriana, or the Tuatha Dé, I was sold. I read and reread and reread those books until they seeped under my skin.

I'd say that this obsession lasted from when I was about thirteen years old (when I first borrowed Katharine Briggs' An Encyclopedia of Fairies from the public library) until I was in my early twenties — twenty, twenty-one or so. It survived one of my two undergrad majors being medieval (Irish) literature, but only just, and studying the topic beyond undergrad level just killed it entirely, with a few exceptions that I still love for sentimental reasons. It's sort of cringy when I think about it, but teenagers always have cringy interests, and at least the evidence of mine is not, for the most part, saved for posterity all over the internet.


11. A book that came to you at exactly the right time

12. A book that came to you at the wrong time

13. A book with a premise you'd never seen before quite like that

14. A book balanced on a knife edge

15. A snuffed candle of a book

16. The one you'd take with you while you were being ferried on dark underground rivers

17. The one that taught you something about yourself

18. A book that went after its premise like an explosion

19. A book that started a pilgrimage

20. A frigid ice bath of a book

21. A book written into your psyche

22. A warm blanket of a book

23. A book that made you bleed

24. A book that asked a question you've never had an answer to

25. A book that answered a question you never asked

26. A book you recommend but cannot love

27. A book you love but cannot recommend

28. A book you adore that people are surprised by

29. A book that led you home

30. A book you detest that people are surprised by