Alex Is Reading...MAGONIA

Maria Dahvana Headley's Magonia isn't exactly the book you think it's going to be. When it starts off, its protagonist is on the verge of dying from a mysterious respiratory illness that has plagued her for her entire life. All right, you think. Here goes another acerbic, wonderful dying teen girl, leaving behind her grieving best friend, and his analytical genius mind, and his tendency to recite pi when he's upset.

Okay, so that already sounds like some darn good writing in the sick teens genre. The thing is, that is not the whole story. The rest of the story is the explanation for this setup: that Aza Ray, seemingly unsuited to the basic facts of life on Earth, isn't strictly speaking of the Earth. That while she wheezes through hospital visits, ships fill the skies invisible to humankind, and birds who sing heart-songs live in people's chests. That while she waits for the day she will die (too young), shapeshifters and flying cities and missing mothers and brutal politics close in. They are coming to rip Aza Ray out of the only world she remembers, into one where she is told that she belongs.

Magonia is a brand-new book, inventive, soaring, and unique, and definitely one to check out.

FIVE BOOKS TO READ ALONGSIDE MAGONIA

1. Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Boy crosses forbidden wall in normal English village; nine months later, boy is left with a baby. Some years after that, the baby goes back across the wall to catch a fallen star for the girl he thinks is the love of his life. Instead he finds out the the star is a (very interesting) person, gets in a lot of trouble at the hands of greedy witches and power-hungry princes, and discovers that his birthright has been on that side of the wall all along...

2. Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

Seraphina has been hiding her half-dragon heritage for her entire life. That has meant hiding herself. But her music is beginning to draw her into the limelight, dragon-human politics are becoming increasingly tense, and Seraphina has just learned that she and other half-dragons can find each other telepathically. Soon Seraphina may have to take a stand--where everyone can see it. The long-long-long anticipated sequel to this one just came out, and you'll be glad you don't have to wait.

3. A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

After Gemma Doyle's mother is murdered, Gemma is sent packing from India to attend her mother's old boarding school. The only saving grace of the school, aside from Gemma's few friends, is a magical discovery: a haunting other world where they have the power to make everything they dream of real. But they're not the only people who know about this magical country--and some of what lurks there is deadly and heartless.

4. Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

The first thing that happens is that Elizabeth Marie Hall dies in a car crash. Then, the story begins: Liz arrives in a strange, quiet place--not quite heaven, not hell, just...elsewhere. As she adjusts to life after death, her family grieves her in their life after her death. Will any of them be able to let go? Surprisingly, Elsewhere isn't a devastating book--it's thoughtful, original, and about learning to look for what comes next.

5. The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman

Impetuous Lyra has grown up sheltered by Oxford's many walls, with only herself and Pan, the animal embodiment of her soul, for company. But thanks to the machinations of distant parents and heartless strangers, she is thrust into a world of witches, portals, armored bears, missing children, and cruel plots that could forever twist her world into an ugly, death-filled place.

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So those are my recommendations for if you want to get your head into the clouds instead of out of them. None of them are entirely safe, but they're sure to be exhilarating. Happy reading!

Destination: Elsewhere

Last week, I was chatting with a coworker as she prepared an after-shift smoke, carefully rolling the tobacco as we discussed the day and her present need, at the end of it, to be elsewhere. "I like to sprinkle a little dried lavender in," she said. "It has a nice effect."

I gasped and wouldn't let her go smoke the lavender-and-tobacco bundle until I had dragged her down to Destination Literature to show her the essay I had read the night before, entitled "Lavender."

The essay is the first in a new collection by Andre Aciman, Alibis: Essays from Elsewhere. The book begins with the scent of lavender, as vivid as if you had been smoking it yourself, emanating from Aciman's father's aftershave. In the next pages Aciman will be tracking the essence of this memory and the essence of the self, trying to determine what fragrance best expresses, epitomizes, and may one day, for his own son, immortalize, him.

The Proustian shadow is eminent in this as well as in the essays that follow. All the reader has to do is replace the scent of lavender with the taste of a tea-soaked madeleine to understand that Aciman is on his own hunt for lost time. Aciman acknowledges his emulation of Proust, accepts it as a part of the self he explores, as a Proust scholar and editor of The Proust Project. A Proust fanatic myself, I forgave any parasitic tendencies in these essays, as Aciman does not just evoke the style and philosophical musings of my favorite author, but continues Proust's exploration of the romantic relationship that our imaginations hold with alibis, elsewhere.

Aciman left Egypt with his family when still a young man, an exodus captured in his work Out of Egypt. In Alibis, Aciman returns to the streets of Rome, his first city of exile, to discover if anything of the past remains from his three years in the city. Instead of memories, however, he finds the streets paved with scenes from the literature he escaped into as a young man absented from any homeland outside of his imagination.

Aciman's tendency to read place through the literary imagination infuses his travel essays with beauty and nostalgia for places never to be returned to. Sometimes literature overrides his experience of reality, and the reader is left believing that the places she longs for can only be found within the confines of the self. But every once in a while the spell works in reverse, as art, such as a cherished Monet painting, leads Aciman on a pilgrimage to a place never before experienced in the immediacy of a present moment. Aciman's descriptive, winding prose captures such moments and tantalizes the reader in much the same way that scenes from literature and art inspired his own travels--to Rome, Venice, Tuscany, Barcelona, Paris, Alexandria, and New York.

The reward of reading these essays in getting to travel with Aciman, not only into new landscapes, but into the reflective depths of the self. After all, much of what the traveler sees in a city is simply a projection of the self. This is what Aciman calls "the miracle of intimacy with a place that may be more in us than it is ever out on the pavement."

Reading these essays is, in fact, not far from the experience of an after-shift smoke: breathing in a new atmosphere, a fresh scent, looking up from the page to letting the reflections swirl about, deep within the self, before exhaling the ephemeral language that inevitably leads your imagination back out into the surrounding streets of your city.
As I neared the end of Aciman's book, I went back to the initial essay, this time with a lavender-laced tobacco pipe in hand. The essay ends in a lavender field in Provence, where Aciman has traveled with his wife and sons. There is a sense of fulfillment in this ending, a comforting feeling that things have come full circle: here is the source of the scent, the thing itself, and, perhaps, a glimpse of the ever-elusive self, no longer dwelling in the past, no longer elsewhere, but finally, fully present, if only for a moment. As I read this passage, I exhaled and sniffed the air.

Like Aciman, and before him, Proust, I was remembering. I first read Proust while house-sitting in Seattle. For me, one of the greatest pleasures of house-sitting is getting to try out soaps, shampoos, and lotions other than your own. The lotion of that particular host, which I would lather on after a bath and before curling up with Proust, was scented with lavender.