Текст книги "Abhorsen"

Автор книги: Garth Nix

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“Bound and broken,” whispered Lirael, staring at her wrist in disbelief. She could still feel her hand, but there was nothing there save a cauterized stump and the burnt ends of her sleeve.

She started to shake then, and the tears came, till she couldn’t see for crying. There was only one thing she knew to do, so she did it, stumbling forward blindly, calling to the Dog.

“Here,” called the Dog softly, in answer to the call. She was lying on her side where the sphere had been, upon a bed of ash. Her tail wagged as she heard Lirael, but only the very tip of it, and she didn’t get up.

Lirael knelt by her side. The hound didn’t seem hurt, but Lirael saw that her muzzle was now frosted white and the skin was loose around her neck, as if she had suddenly become old. The Dog raised her head very slowly as Lirael bent over her, and gave her a little lick on the face.

“Well, that’s done, Mistress,” she whispered, her head dropping back. “I have to leave you now.”

“No,” sobbed Lirael. She hugged her with her handless arm and buried her cheek against the Dog’s snout. “It was supposed to be me! I won’t let you go! I love you, Dog!”

“There’ll be other dogs, and friends, and loves,” whispered the Dog. “You have found your family, your heritage; and you have earned a high place in the world. I love you too, but my time with you has passed. Goodbye, Lirael.”

Then she was gone, and Lirael was left bowed over a small soapstone statue of a dog.

Behind her, she heard Yrael speak, and Sabriel, and the brief chime of Belgaer, so strange after the massed song of all the bells, its single voice freeing Mogget from his millennia of servitude. But the sound was far away, in another place, another time.

Sam found Lirael a moment later, curled up in the ash, the carving of the Dog nestled in the crook of her handless arm. She held Astarael – the Weeper – with her remaining hand, her fingers clenched tight around the clapper so it could not sound.

epilogue

Nick stood in the river and watched with interest as the current tugged at his knees. He wanted to go with that current, to lie down and be swept away, taking his guilt and sorrow with him to wherever the river might go. But he couldn’t move, because he was somehow fixed in place by a force that emanated from the patch of heat on his forehead, which was very strange when everything else was cold.

After a time that could have been minutes or hours or even days – for there was no way to tell whether time meant anything at all in this place of constant grey light – Nick noticed there was a dog sitting next to him. A large brown and black dog, with a serious expression. It looked kind of familiar.

“You’re the dog from my dream,” said Nick. He bent down to scratch it on the head. “Only it wasn’t a dream, was it? You had wings.”

“Yes,” agreed the dog. “I’m the Disreputable Dog, Nicholas.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Nick formally. The Dog offered a paw, and Nicholas shook it. “Do you happen to know where we are? I thought I—”

“Died,” replied the Dog cheerily. “You did. This is Death.”

“Ah,” replied Nick. Once he might have wanted to argue about that. Now he had a different perspective, and other things to think about. “Do you... did they... the hemispheres?”

“Orannis has been bound anew,” announced the Dog. “It is once again imprisoned in the hemispheres. In due course, they will be transported back to the Old Kingdom and buried deep beneath stone and spell.”

Relief crossed Nick’s face and smoothed out the lines of worry around his eyes and mouth. He knelt down beside the Dog to hug her, feeling the warmth of her skin in sharp contrast to the chill of the river. The bright collar around her neck was nice too. It gave him a warm feeling in his chest.

“Sam and... and Lirael?” asked Nick hopefully, his head still bowed, close to the Dog’s ear.

“They live,” replied the Dog. “Though not without scathe. My mistress lost her hand. Prince Sameth will make her one, of course, of shining gold and clever magic. Lirael Goldenhand, she’ll be for ever after. Remembrancer and Abhorsen, and much else besides. But there are other hurts, which require different remedies. She is very young. Stand up, Nicholas.”

Nicholas stood. He wavered a little as the current tried to trip him and take him under.

“I gave you a late baptism to preserve your spirit,” said the Dog. “You bear the Charter mark on your forehead now, to balance the Free Magic that lingers in your blood and bone. You will find Charter mark and Free Magic both boon and burden, for they will take you far from Ancelstierre, and the path you will walk will not be the one you have long thought to see ahead.”

“What do you mean?” asked Nick in bewilderment. He touched the mark on his forehead and blinked as it flared with sudden light. The Dog’s collar shone too, with many other bright marks that surrounded her head with a corona of golden light. “What do you mean, far from Ancelstierre? How can I go anywhere? I’m dead, aren’t—”

“I’m sending you back,” said the Dog gently, nudging Nick’s leg with her snout, so he turned to face towards Life. Then she barked, a single sharp sound that was both a welcome and a farewell.

“Is this allowed?” asked Nick as he felt the current reluctantly release him, and he took the first step back.

“No,” said the Dog. “But then I am the Disreputable Dog.”

Nick took another step, and he smiled as he felt the warmth of Life, and the smile became a laugh, a laugh that welcomed everything, even the pain that waited in his body.

In Life, his waking eyes looked up and he saw the sun breaking through a low, dark cloud, and its warmth and light fell on a diamond-shaped patch of earth where he lay, safe amidst ruin and destruction. Nick sat up and saw soldiers approaching, picking their way across an ashen desert. Southerlings followed the soldiers, their just-scrubbed hats and scarves bright blue, the only colour in the wasteland.

A white cat suddenly appeared next to Nicholas’s feet. He sniffed in disgust and said, “I might have known”; then he looked past Nick at something that wasn’t there and winked, before trotting off in a northerly direction.

The cat was followed a little later by the weary footsteps of six people, who were supporting the seventh. Nick managed to stand and wave, and in the space of that tiny movement and its startled response, he had time to wonder what all the future held, and think that it would be much brighter than the past.

The Disreputable Dog sat with her head cocked to one side for several minutes, her wise old eyes seeing much more than the river, her sharp ears hearing more than just the gurgle of the current. After a while a small, enormously satisfied rumble sounded from deep in her chest. She got up, grew her legs longer to get her body out of the water and shook herself dry. Then she wandered off, following a zigzag path along the border between Life and Death, her tail wagging so hard, the tip of it beat the river into a froth behind her.

Extra...

Garth Nix answers

FAQs...

The following is a small selection of the questions I am asked by readers via mail or in letters. The answers are those current at the time this book went to press, so there is always the possibility some of the answers will change.

Are you going to write another book about Sabriel?

I’m unlikely to write another book in which Sabriel is the main character. I do however, have notes for two novels set in the Old Kingdom and Ancelstierre. One is about Chlorr of the Mask and her early life, it takes place several hundred years before the events in Sabriel. Another is set about three years after ‘Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case’ and would see some of the main characters from Abhorsen return. Despite the fact that I have these notes, I may not write the books.

How do you pronounce Sabriel, Lirael and Ancelstierre?

I always say you can pronounce the names however you like. I

sometimes change how I pronounce them myself. However:

Sabriel SAB-REE-ELLE or SAY-BREE-ELLE

Lirael LI-RAY-ELLE (with the ‘Li’ as in ‘lift’)

Ancelstierre AN-SELL-STEE-AIR

Will there be a movie of Sabriel and the other books in the trilogy?

Maybe. I’ve always said I’d rather have no movie than a bad movie. I can only influence this by carefully choosing who I sell the film rights to, and, in my case, by attempting to sell those rights not directly to a studio but as part of a ‘package’ that includes a writer (or co-writer) and director whose work I admire and trust. Even if I manage to do this and at various times this has looked likely, a movie still might not get made. If it is going to happen, you’ll hear about it!

What’s Touchstone’s real name?

Have a look at the last chapter of Abhorsen (not the epilogue), when the seven are attempting to bind Orannis. Touchstone uses his true name then.

The map on the front page describes one area, is there more to this world?

Yes. There is much more to both the world of Ancelstierre (some other countries are mentioned in Lirael and Abhorsen) and the world of the Old Kingdom. In effect there are two worlds which overlap or impinge on each other only in an area roughly described by the Wall and out to sea for some distance.

Why did you choose bells as the tools of necromantic magic?

It’s always difficult to work out where particular ideas come from. However, in the case of the bells that necromancers and the Abhorsens use, I think there were two points of inspiration. The first was that I was trying to think up a kind of magic that was a bit different to that normally encountered in fantasy fiction, and as it was to be used by the Abhorsens I was looking into folklore about exorcising evil spirits and so on.

Possibly the most famous form of exorcism is by ‘bell, book and candle’. That set me to thinking. Books were out, because I wanted something different from books of spells. Candles were out because they would not be very dramatic and also highly impractical (at least so I thought back then, I have since considered ways they could work). That left me with bells.

Around the same time, from reading Dorothy L. Sayers’ murder mystery The Nine Tailors, I became aware that church bells often had names. That led me to look into the naming of bells. The two inspirations converged and I made up the seven bells, with their names and characteristics.

Where do you get your ideas?

Ideas do not, as a rule, spring fully-formed into or out of any writer’s head, unless you put something in that head in the first place. You need to fill your mind and memory and both consciously and subconsciously work with all the material you have gathered to create ideas.

I personally gather ‘raw idea material’ from everything that goes on around me, from everything that I observe and experience, either directly or vicariously. I get ideas from my own life, from other people’s lives, from reading (particularly history, biography, myths and legends), from television, from the Internet. I might get ideas from observing people in the street; from incidents in, or details of, history; from myth and legend; from landscape; from the living natural world; from the sciences; from all the fiction I’ve ever read.

By ‘ideas’ I don’t mean fully-fledged plots, situations or characters, for these are expressions of ideas, things that are worked up from the raw material. The fleeting bits of information that lodge in my head could include ‘ideas’ like:

• The look of the sky in spring when a light rain is falling at sunset

• The Venetian agents who stole the body of St Mark from Alexandria in the 7th century

• Hand-forged roman nails

• A huge Persian carpet of blue and gold, easily forty feet long and forty feet wide

• Mynah birds turning on an injured fellow

• An absent-minded man’s peculiar walk

These are all just bits of information that arrived in my mind in various ways. I have spent a lot of time looking at spring skies with the rain falling – in fact I look at the weather a lot and think about how it might be used in stories. I read about the Venetian agents who stole the body of St Mark in John Julius Norwich’s history of Venice. I have seen Roman nails in various museums and have handled replica nails. The Persian carpet I saw in a mosque in Syria, but I might just have easily have seen it in a book or on television. The mynah birds are a pest in my back garden, and the absent-minded man walks past my office at least once a week and his peculiar progress is always of interest.

I like to think of my mind as a kind of reservoir that is constantly being topped up with all kinds of information, which I am also unconsciously sifting all the time for things that might be useful in making a story. While the reservoir is constantly being topped up with new information, my subsconscious and sometimes conscious mind is at work on both sifting these chunks of information and connecting them into larger rafts of ideas that may form the basis of a story. This is essentially daydreaming, taking thoughts and seeing where they might go and how they might connect with other thoughts.

In many ways daydreaming is one of the core prerequisites for writing. The trick is to get past the daydreaming phase and actually do something with all that idle musing. Ideas by themselves are merely a raw material, and it is not enough just to have ideas. You have to work to turn them into a story.

Do you have a favorite among your books?

My favorite is always the one I haven't written yet, because when I imagine a book, it’s always better in my head than how they come out. I’m always wanting to try and get closer to the story as it is imagined. I never get there, but I always think it’s possible . . .

Is Garth Nix your real name?

Yes. I guess people ask me because it sounds like the perfect pseudonym for a writer of fantasy. However it is my real name!

Will you ever write a sequel/prequel to Shade’s Children?

I have no plans to write a sequel and no notes about possible storylines. However, I never know when a story will rise up out of my subconscious. A sequel is at least theoretically possible, as I always envisaged that the Overlords in Shade’s Children had taken over a single continent (basically Australia) and nowhere else, and the rest of the world was unable to intervene. So maybe the Overlords could try and establish themselves elsewhere …

books remembered

Garth Nix’s favourite books from childhood

There were several false starts to this list, which I originally wrote for the journal of the Children’s Book Council, USA. I began writing it in a hotel in Vancouver. I did a little more in a hotel in Washington D.C. A bit more got done during the long flight home to Sydney. Then I junked what I’d written, because I didn’t like how it was coming out.

The problems were many. First of all, I couldn’t possibly fit in all the significant books and authors of my childhood. The first dredging of the deep sludge of my mind made it clear I was also unable to organise the books in any meaningful way. All the books I wanted to mention I remembered because they were great books. All were and are important to me in many different ways and for many different reasons.

I couldn’t order them chronologically from when I read them because I mostly couldn’t remember when I did. Most of them I read in that space of true discovery, from the age of nine or so to maybe seventeen or eighteen. I didn’t think there was much point to ordering them by publication date either. They were new when I discovered them, regardless of whether they had been discovered by other readers days, months, years or even decades before.

Ultimately, I was left with one of the simplest organisational methods of all for this piece. A cunning structure, beloved of librarian, booksellers and highly-motivated book owners. Alphabetical by author.

So this is my own personal reading alphabet, the highlights of the years when I read six or seven or a dozen books a week. An annotated alphabet, with my comments and some rough notes as to what kind of books they are. I focused on Science Fiction and Fantasy, but others crept in. Many others had to be left out, for reasons of alphabetical, spatial or mental failure.

I’m sure there will be many old friends of yours here, dear reader, but I hope there will some new (and old) discoveries as well.

A is for Lloyd Alexander, Joan Aiken, and Poul Anderson

I remember reading Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain completely out of order, but it didn’t matter. I loved the combination of humour and adventure, and as I got older, my favourite book in the series changed from one to another and back again. I suspect this is because the careful mix of the serious and the light-hearted is different in each book, so they appeal to different moods and times. Taran Wanderer probably retains pole position to this day, but I love all the books.

Joan Aiken’s short stories are wonderfully imaginative and inventive as are her novels. My particular favourites are her short story collections, such as All You Ever Wanted and the ‘unhistorical’ novels set in a 19th century that never happened, from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea to The Cuckoo Tree. The later sequels (read with childhood long behind) never quite connected so well with me. Midnight Is A Place, the tale of two orphans forced to live by their wits in a horrendous 19th century industrial town, is another one I come back to re-read every now and again.

Poul Anderson was one of my ‘must-read’ SF writers as a teenager. I particularly devoured his Dominic Flandry books, tales of a naval intelligence officer in a decaying galactic empire, fighting the good fight while also cynically looking after himself. The books became more complex over time, as did Flandry himself. A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows is the standout, but all of them are good. Start with the first, Agent of the Terran Empire.

B is for John Brunner and Barbara Ninde Byfield

John Brunner’s Traveller in Black had a major impact upon me. I loved everything about it, from the bizarre, elemental characters of a chaotic, magical past to the dreadful fates of many of the selfish people who unwisely wished for something when the Traveller was nearby. Brunner plays with ideas of fate, self-will, time, creation and much else with baroque mastery.

Barbara Ninde Byfield’s book The Glass Harmonica (reissued a few years ago as The Book of Weird) is paradoxically not a book remembered from my childhood. It is a book I wanted desperately to get after I read a reference to it in The Book of Andre Norton. If memory serves me correctly, Norton referred to it as the book you need to have to find out what a ‘castellan’ is and the difference between a wizard and sorceror. But I didn’t get my hands on a copy until many years later, only to discover that it was worth the wait. Delightfully illustrated by the author, its subtitle hints at its contents: ‘A Lexicon of the Fantastical, in which it is determined that: wizards see best with their eyes closed; Torturers reek of mutton, cold sweat and rust; It is Unwise to take a Herald on a Picnic ...’ and much more. If only I’d got hold of a copy when I was 10, instead of 36! In minor tribute, I named one of the four main characters in my book Shade’s Children Ninde.

C is for Susan Cooper and Joy Chant

I am sure The Dark Is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper needs no further introduction here. I read The Dark is Rising first. I didn’t know Over Sea, Under Stone existed and had to wait for the others since I got to the series early on. On cold, wintry days I used to imagine that I was about to slip into that other, magical world concurrent with our own, the one inhabited by the Light and the Dark and the Old Ones.

Red Moon, Black Mountain by Joy Chant is what I would call ‘harder-edged Narnia’. This is a novel in which children are transported to a fantasy world and take part in a great struggle against evil. Grittier and tougher than Narnia, it was unjustly neglected, probably because it was way ahead of its time. There is a sequel of sorts, but I never took to it.

D is for Dumas

The Three Musketeers is not SF or Fantasy, but it has much in common with them. History, after all, is another world to which we cannot travel except in the mind. This is a great adventure story, a great love story, and a great portal to what is, in effect, another world. Be sure to find a good translation, one that captures the humour and energy of the original (from memory the Bantam Classics paperback is a good one). And be sure to watch the best films made from the book, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, directed by Richard Lester and adapted by George MacDonald Fraser.

E is for Edward Eager

Where do you go after reading all the way through E. Nesbit? This was a particularly good question in the early 1970s when there wasn’t an awful lot of fantasy around. Eager was Nesbit’s natural successor and, to an Australian, his American children and settings were of interest in themselves, even apart from the fantasy elements. Knight’s Castle is still my favourite. I bought them all again recently, in their clean white newness, as reissued by Harcourt/Odyssey with lovely Quentin Blake covers (but also thankfully with the original N. M. Bodecker internal illustrations).

F is for C. S. Forester

I’m a sucker for Napoleonic nautical adventures, and C. S. Forester started it all with his Hornblower books. They’re more accessible than Patrick O’Brian of Master and Commander film fame (though I very much like his books too). Again, these are historical novels that have much of the same appeal as fantasy. Adventures in another time and place. Hornblower is a strangely likeable unlikeable character with much more to him than you might expect, and there are many personal, human stories in addition to running out the guns, climbing to the topmast, hoisting all sail and so forth.

G is for Nicholas Stuart Gray, Alan Garner and Robert Graves

Nicholas Stuart Gray wrote charming, clever English children’s fantasies, sometimes drawing on fairy tales like Rapunzel as he does in The Stone Cage, where the story is observed from the point of view of the witch’s cat. I’m also very fond of Grimbold’s Other World and The Apple Stone. Some of his books are rather too dated now, and self-conscious, but the good ones have not aged.

Like other authors on this list, Alan Garner probably needs no introduction. Suffice to say that if I could write three pages that were as good as the last three pages of The Owl Service I would be a very happy author. Like many, I love Garner’s earlier work more than the later books, though I always admire what he does. My favourites are The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, and The Owl Service. When I was nineteen, and travelling around the UK in my beat-up Austin, I went to Cheshire and climbed Alderley Edge. But I couldn’t find Fundindelve . . .

Robert Graves was important to me for three very different books. I, Claudius and Claudius the God seemed to me not to be novels so much as actual accounts given by the real Claudius. As I was fascinated by Roman history (particularly Roman Britain, thanks to Rosemary Sutcliff) I was deeply interested in an actual Emperor’s real story – or so I assumed at the age of twelve or thirteen. The third book was Goodbye To All That, Graves’s autobiographical account of his experiences in World War One. One of my great-great-uncles died in that war, at Flers. My mother’s father, a young subaltern in 1916, died in the 1960s from emphysema that was a result of being gassed. Every little town in Australia has a memorial to the dead, a whole generation of young men lost from a country with only a tiny population. Graves really brought the First World War into sharp, personal focus for me for the first time. I believe there are two versions of the book, and one is considerably more complete than the other.

H is for Robert Heinlein and Georgette Heyer

Robert Heinlein was probably my favourite science fiction writer through my teenage years. With books like Red Planet, Between Planets, Starman Jones, Have Space Suit Will Travel, Space Cadet (not a perjorative term when it first came out), Tunnel in the Sky, Farmer in the Sky, Starship Troopers, and Citizen of the Galaxy how could he not be a favourite? All great stories, told with such surety that they seemed real to me, to be almost true tales from far futures, somehow sent back. He lost some of his sense of story, I think, after The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a book I loved in my later teens. I can still re-read all the titles I’ve mentioned, which illustrates my high esteem for the books both then and now.

I came to Georgette Heyer in my late teens. I don’t like her murder mysteries and her ‘serious’ historical novels like Lord John don’t interest me either. But I love her Regency Romances. Some are better than others, but the best are enormously entertaining, historically accurate, and very funny adventure stories. Oh, and there’ll be some romance in there somewhere. I heartily recommend Friday’s Child, Uncommon Ajax, Sylvester, These Old Shades, Devil’s Cub, The Toll Gate and . . . in fact any of her Regency novels are well worth reading.

I is for Incomplete

I couldn’t think of any authors whose surnames begin with I. Naturally a dozen of them will fall off my shelves as soon as i stop looking, and I will be e-mailed hundreds more names. Regardless, at this point, ‘I’ is for Incomplete, as in The Incomplete Enchanter by L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Either of these authors could have appeared here on their own, De Camp for Lest Darkness Fall (modern engineer falls back in time to the late Roman period) and Pratt for The Blue Star (a fantasy set in a kind of 18th century pre-revolutionary France). Both authors were way ahead of the fantasy pack, beginning their work in the 1940s.

J is for Tove Jansson

Moomintrolls! I still want to live in a Moomin House on an island somewhere. These books are for any age, but I loved them most ferociously from the age of eight or so to ten or thereabouts (I’ve never stopped loving them, of course; now I just spread my affections among more books). My mother made puppets of the entire cast of Moominland Midwinter and put the book on as a puppet play when I was eight. Sadly, only the Groke survives, as no silverfish or mouse would dare eat that cold personage. For no other reason than the fact that it was the first one I read myself, I suggest starting with Moominsummer Madness, or perhaps Comet in Moominland. Chronology is not really important to the Moomin books, though the later ones are tinged with melancholy, perhaps from the long Northern nights.

K is for Rudyard Kipling

Captains Courageous introduced me to Kipling. A great sea adventure and a sharp insight into the relationships between boys, between sons and fathers, and between husbands and wives. It was contemporary when Kipling wrote it, so I’m not sure if can be called a historical novel, though now of course it is. For other Kipling, my favourites are (of course) Kim and the Just So Stories. And I liked The Jungle Book as a child, before every shred of its narrative power was used and re-used and turned to dust by Disney.

L is for Ursula Le Guin

A Wizard of Earthsea was a fantasy that, like The Lord of the Rings, seemed to me to be a true tale from somewhere else. Not a made-up story, but something real. I read and re-read it, and wished I knew the true names of the world around me. I felt the same with the two sequels The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore (the later sequels came out when I was in my twenties and thirties). I also found this sense of truth or reality in Le Guin’s science fiction, particularly The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

M is for John Masefield and Arthur Mee

The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights by John Masefield (the English poet) are two little-known fantasies. They are full of invention, connection to myth, legend and folklore, and fascinating characters. They have their faults, mainly (I think) because of some assumptions about how children’s books were supposed to be written in the 1920s. But they are still excellent fantasy novels of normal children slipping into marvellous realms that co-exist with our own world. Be sure to get unabridged versions.

Arthur Mee was probably a horribly well-meaning Christian gentleman who lived and breathed children’s education. Nevertheless, his Children’s Encyclopaedia, of which there were many editions over the years, was a vital source of much of my abstruse knowledge and peculiar trivia. I think I learned all my Greek legends at an early age from an old set of Arthur Mee’s Encyclopaedia that had belonged to my grandmother. Where else could you look up the number of groats to a penny, or the heart rate of a stoat?

N is for Andre Norton and E. Nesbit

Andre Norton ran neck-and-neck with Heinlein as my favourite SF author in my childhood. Interestingly, while I can re-read Heinlein, many of the Norton novels do not fare so well. though she was a great storyteller, her prose has dated more. But the good stuff is still good stuff, and in that category I would include Sargasso of Space, Plague Ship, Postmarked the Stars, Star Man’s Son, Star Guard, Android at Arms, Beastmaster, Catseye and Star Gate.

E. Nesbit was for an early part of my reading experience the only fantasy author available apart from Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Some of her books were read to me by my parents and others I read when I was only six or seven. I recently re-read The Enchanted Castle and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I’m going to dig out The Phoenix and the Carpet, Five Children and It and some of the others.

Ois for ‘Oh, dear, I’m running out of space.’ Slave to the word count, we shall skip to the next letter. Otherwise I would have something to say about the poems of Wilfrid Owen here.

Pis for Philippa Pearce

To be honest I haven’t re-read Tom’s Midnight Garden since I was nine or ten and I can’t remember much about it, other than that I really liked it at the time. This points up the fact that I do reread my favourite books, usually once every five to ten years. It only works with really good books, but with them you can always get something new, in addition to the comfortable nostalgia of reading old favourites. I haven’t re-read Tom’s Midnight Garden because I don’t have a copy, a situation that I will soon rectify.