Beyond Selidor

I'm kind of delightedly amused that yesterday, on the tenth anniversary of Ed Balls Day, the New York Times wrote an in-depth article about this meme that will not die. I'm even more delightedly amused that, as per Yvette Cooper, he apparently made a cake to commemorate this important moment of internet history.

Today is the penultimate day of the thirty-day book meme:

29. A book that led you home



This is another one of those prompts that asks for a single book, and I respond with a series. In this case, it's not one series, but two: the Pagan Chronicles by Catherine Jinks, and the Romanitas trilogy by Sophia McDougall. As I have written about both series of books extensively on this blog, I'm not going to recap them again, but will rather link back to previous posts.

Pagan Chronicles:

They manage to pack in a lot of medieval politics, theology, religious controversies, and intellectual culture, without it ever feeling like too much. [...]

If there's one thing none of the characters have any patience for, however, it's incompetence and hypocrisy — and worst of all is incompetent hypocrisy! They are infinitely patient with people who are hurt and afraid, and save the full weight of their scorn for those abusing their positions of unearned authority. [...]

Above all, though, these books gave me my lifelong love of stories of dispossessed, traumatised, exiled characters finding home, family and healing in each other. They gave me exactly what I wanted: characters who find themselves in exile (either in a political/geographical sense due to war, or in a psychological sense due to a lack of identification with the values of the families of their birth), and who build a home and sense of purpose within that exilic space. It is one, long, forty-year saga of found family and emotional hurt/comfort, and it gave me my lifelong love of those tropes. I've been seeking them out in fiction ever since — and every so often, I return to their source, the Pagan Chronicles, the well for me which never runs dry.

Romanitas trilogy

I will read or watch just about any iteration of story that engages with ideas of power, privilege and dispossession: who has power, and why, and who is dispossessed by that power, and why. But I need the stories to do something more: they need to place the blame for inequality and dispossession where it truly lies, on an institutional level, and on individuals within such institutions. The stories need to centre the dispossessed, although it's an added bonus if they consider the various ways in which power, empire and privilege corrupt and dehumanise those who benefit from them. And they need to show that the strength of the dispossessed lies in them finding common ground, making common cause, dismantling the systems that oppress them, supporting one another, carving out spaces in which they are able to safely assert their humanity. [...]

[Some of the reasons why I love this series]

2. Resistance movements being run out of the Library of Alexandria.

3. Small moments where terrified women support one another in tiny ways. They are reduced to making small gestures, and those limits turn such small gestures into actions of monumental significance.

6. In a moment of profound personal importance to me, my favourite female fictional character, though terrified, stands up, speaks her truth and claims a name which has been denied her (a name with which she has an uneasy relationship), asserting her humanity in the face of certain death at the hands of those who don't view her as a person.

7. Victims make common cause, and surge like a wave to confront their abuser, and their presence is like an accusation. When I read this moment for the first time, I literally put the book down and danced around the room.

This series speaks to me, it means so much to me. It is a consolation and an exhortation to do better, try harder, find common ground and carve out spaces which do not replicate toxic old hierarchies. Several elements of it have particular personal resonances, and I reread those scenes and chapters whenever I need courage and strength.

These series are part of the bones of me, and their stories sit in the spaces around my heart, guiding me back to myself, calling me home.


30. A book you detest that people are surprised by