Delicious turns of phrase

I used to write in the margins of my books — not my college texts, but my fiction books. An asterisk here, parens around a portion of a paragraph there, dog-eared pages everywhere.

I’ve always thought there was something musical about the way certain authors simply say things…I could (and do) read some of it out loud (when I’m on my own so no one will think I’m nuts) just to relish the turns of phrase, enjoy the sound and feel of the words on my tongue. Is that wierd?

Certain authors are better at it than others. My beloved Dorothy Sayers is, of course. CS Lewis, and some fantasy authors are as well, like Stephen Donaldson, and Connie Willis.

Donaldson’s Mirror of Her Dreams is probably one of my most marked-up books. When you read sentences like “The air was whetted with cold, as hard as a slap and as penetrating as splinters” it brings a subzero winter’s day to life as if I were living it.

Or at the beginning, when his heroine, Terisa Morgan, is doubting her existence, and describes herself as being “…so unmarked by experience, decision, or impact that she was dimly surprised to find [she was] still able to cast a reflection. Surely she was fading? Surely she would wake up one morning, look at herself in the mirror and see nothing?” And later in the day, that she was “slowly being dissolved by the pointlessness of what she did.” (Hmm…like that never reflects my existence?!)

Or the horns — how the horns she kept hearing in her dreams “made everything she saw appear sharper and less dreary, more important.” The beginning of that book is full of vivid imagery that has you feel like you could step right into the middle of it, if you could only find the right mirror.

Another book so full of descriptions so full of imagination you can chew on them, is Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog.” When the hero, Ned Henry, keeps thinking in titles, like when he has Difficulty Distinguishing Sounds or has problems with Quickness in Answering when he is time-lagged from too much time travel.

Or when he gets back to the Victorian era, and figures out that “the reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over” after putting two and two together, and describing about a dozen pieces of furniture and object d’art in one room that the lady of house had miraculously managed to miss while swooning earlier in the evening. And jumble sales, penwipers, Oxford dons, punting on the Thames, Coventry cathedral, seances, butlers and bulldogs, and….so much more. Chock full of snappy dialogue and descriptions that would make my mouth water if it were food.

I’m not sure what made me think of that today, of all things. But the mark of a good book to me is one that has me stopping to re-read passages, to read them out loud to just enjoy the pure beauty of the words and the imagination of the author that thought to string them together.