What Makes This Book So Great Quotes

“When I re-read, I know what I'm getting. It's like revisiting an old friend. An unread book holds wonderful unknown promise, but also threatens disappointment. A re-read is a known quantity.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“My ideal relationship with a book is that I will read it for the first time entirely unspoiled. I won’t know anything whatsoever about it, it will be wonderful, it will be exciting and layered and complex and I will be excited by it, and I will re-read it every year or so for the rest of my life, discovering more about it every time, and every time remembering the circumstances in which I first read it.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who re-read and those who don’t. No, don’t be silly, there are far more than two kinds of people in the world. There are even people who don’t read at all. (What do they think about on buses?) But there are two kinds of readers in the world, though, those who re-read and those who don’t. Sometimes people who don’t re-read look at me oddly when I mention that I do. “There are so many books,” they say, “and so little time. If I live to be a mere Methuselah of 800, and read a book a week for 800 years, I will only have the chance to read 40,000 books, and my readpile is already 90,000 and starting to topple! If I re-read, why, I’ll never get through the new ones.” This is in fact true, they never will. And my readpile is also, well, let’s just say it’s pretty large, and that’s just the pile of unread books in my house, not the list of books I’d theoretically like to read someday, many of which have not even been written yet.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“The trouble with mimetic fiction isn’t that you can tell what’s going to happen (I defy anyone to guess what’s going to happen in Middlemarch, even from halfway through) but that you can tell what’s not going to happen. There isn’t going to be an evil wizard. The world isn’t going to be destroyed in Cultural Fugue and leave the protagonist as the only survivor. There aren’t going to be any people who happen to have one mind shared between five bodies. There are unlikely to be shape-changers. In science fiction you can have any kind of story—a romance or a mystery or a reflection of human nature, or anything at all. But as well as that, you have infinite possibility. You can tell different stories about human nature when you can compare it to android nature, or alien nature. You can examine it in different ways when you can write about people living for two hundred years, or being relativistically separated, or under a curse. You have more colours for your palette, more lights to illuminate your scene.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy

“A re-read is more leisurely than a first read. I know the plot, after all, I know what happens. I may still cry (embarrassingly, on the train) when re-reading, but I won’t be surprised. Because I know what’s coming, because I’m familiar with the characters and the world of the story, I have more time to pay attention to them. I can immerse myself in details and connections I rushed past the first time and delight in how they are put together. I can relax into the book. I can trust it completely. I really like that.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“the knowledge that change can be frightening, that responsibility can, but that the answer to that is not refusing to change or to accept responsibility.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Our myths, our legends, aren't necessarily true, but they are truly necessary. They have to do with the way we interpret the world and our place in it.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“What do you want to be, free or happy? How about if they really are mutually exclusive options? What is freedom anyway? How does humanity govern itself when each person can have anything they want? How does humanity govern itself when nothing is natural?”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“It’s the books I love best that are the hardest to write about. I don’t want to take one angle on them, I want to dive into them and quote huge chunks and tell you everything about them, and it just isn’t possible.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“I read in hopes of little sparkling moments that are going to turn my head inside out.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Left to themselves, people remake their origin stories every few generations to suit present circumstances.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character.
In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Kids are really good at ignoring the heavy-handed message and getting with the fun parts. It's good they are, because adults have devoted a lot of effort writing them message thinly disguised as stories and clubbing children over the head with them.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Our myths, our legends, aren't necessarily true, but they are truly necessary.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“what's real within the story is real within the story”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“I read a lot of older children's books when I was a kid, and you wouldn't believe how many sugar-coated tracts I sucked the sugar off and cheerfully ran off, spitting out the message undigested. (Despite going to church several times every Sunday for my who childhood, I never figured out Aslan was Jesus until told later.)”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“I think of a second reading of a book as completing my read, a first reading is preliminary and reactions to a first reading are suspect.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“It’s a very intense book both emotionally and intellectually—in that way I’d compare it to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and Cyteen. Like those books it is about what it means to love, and what it means to have your life path readjusted and hack your brain with technological mediation. They’d make a wonderful thematic trilogy of, “Look, this is what SF can do and the kind of questions it can ask!”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy

“This may seem like a strange thing to say, but these are post-9/11 fantasy. I've read post-9/11 SF already, but this is the first fantasy that had that feel fore me. I don't mea they have allegory, or even applicability. They're their own thing, not a shadow-play of our world. But they have that sensibility, in the same way that Tolkien was writing about Dark Lords in the shadow of Hitler and Stalin and Marion Zimmer Bradley was writing about Free Amazons during the seventies upswell of feminism.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“If I’m stuck in bed it’s not unusual for me to read half a dozen books in a day. I know I’m not going to live forever, I know there are more books than I can ever read. But I know that in my head, the same way I know the speed of light is a limit. In my heart I know reading is forever and FTL is just around the corner.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy

“Having a world unfold in one’s head is the fundamental SF experience. It’s a lot of what I read for. Delany has a long passage about how your brain expands while reading the sentence “The red sun is high, the blue low”—how it fills in doubled purple shadows on the planet of a binary star. I think it goes beyond that, beyond the physical into the delight of reading about people who come from other societies and have different expectations.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy