Diana Wynne Jones
Mar. 26th, 2011 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustDiana Wynne Jones is dead, and that's a pity. Interestingly, looking back, I think I must have stopped reading her books at a very specific point, because people are always referencing ones I've never heard of as their absolute favourites. I didn't even read Howl's Moving Castle 'til I heard that Miyazaki was making a movie version.
But I'm fairly certain I may have read more of them than I remember reading, actually, because the three which always crowd everything else out of my brain are the same ones I read over and over when I was eleven, at one of my shittiest-ever points--before I finally got into an alternative school, back when people mocked me for having breasts, a period, glasses, the ability to write and a bad temper on a pretty much continual daily basis. When people I thought were my friends came to my birthday party and left one of my maxipads out on the stairs, then called everybody to come take a look; that sort of crap. Some of these people I scared and hurt in return (I strangled a girl for saying a whale I drew looked like a tadpole, for example, and threatened to lobotomize someone with a compass), but most of them got off scott-free. And now I've erased their faces so efficiently from my mind that I wouldn't recognize them if I met them walking down the street, so there you go; problem solved.
Anyhow: Those three DWJ books in question were Dogsbody, Eight Days of Luke and Power of Three. All contain wonderful language and a palpable love of myth and symbolism, as well as great understanding of how cruelty and poetry lie forever neck-to-neck in life; they explain how the power to reshape your own story always lies in your own hands, but also how everyone thinks of themselves as a hero even while acting like a villain, how we are far more alike than unalike, how empathy and intelligence can create friendship, which in turn can create what most people call "luck"...or even "magic". And these are very useful things indeed to hear about when you are massive and uncomfortable and hate everyone, mainly because you're painfully aware that everyone around you hates you.
Everybody dies. It's inevitable. But when I see person after person posting about Jones as though she was a beloved aunt/role model/personal mentor even though (in most cases) she wasn't, I think: Man, that's pretty good. I'd be happy to think anybody might say anything even vaguely comparable about me after I'm gone, even though I'll probably never know any better, if they do.
But I'm fairly certain I may have read more of them than I remember reading, actually, because the three which always crowd everything else out of my brain are the same ones I read over and over when I was eleven, at one of my shittiest-ever points--before I finally got into an alternative school, back when people mocked me for having breasts, a period, glasses, the ability to write and a bad temper on a pretty much continual daily basis. When people I thought were my friends came to my birthday party and left one of my maxipads out on the stairs, then called everybody to come take a look; that sort of crap. Some of these people I scared and hurt in return (I strangled a girl for saying a whale I drew looked like a tadpole, for example, and threatened to lobotomize someone with a compass), but most of them got off scott-free. And now I've erased their faces so efficiently from my mind that I wouldn't recognize them if I met them walking down the street, so there you go; problem solved.
Anyhow: Those three DWJ books in question were Dogsbody, Eight Days of Luke and Power of Three. All contain wonderful language and a palpable love of myth and symbolism, as well as great understanding of how cruelty and poetry lie forever neck-to-neck in life; they explain how the power to reshape your own story always lies in your own hands, but also how everyone thinks of themselves as a hero even while acting like a villain, how we are far more alike than unalike, how empathy and intelligence can create friendship, which in turn can create what most people call "luck"...or even "magic". And these are very useful things indeed to hear about when you are massive and uncomfortable and hate everyone, mainly because you're painfully aware that everyone around you hates you.
Everybody dies. It's inevitable. But when I see person after person posting about Jones as though she was a beloved aunt/role model/personal mentor even though (in most cases) she wasn't, I think: Man, that's pretty good. I'd be happy to think anybody might say anything even vaguely comparable about me after I'm gone, even though I'll probably never know any better, if they do.
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Date: 2011-03-27 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-27 03:36 pm (UTC)