For Amergin, who brings me immortality

[dolorosa_12]

Thirty Day Book Meme Day 22: Out of print

One of my favourite books when I was a teenager was The Singing Stone by Canadian author O.R. Melling. It's a portal fantasy in which Canadian student (and orphan with mysterious origins) Kay goes on a trip to Ireland to discover the secrets behind her origins, and ends up sucked into the past when climbing around some standing stones. She tumbles into a world of magic and intrigue, hovering on the brink of invasion and war, and has to go on a quest to find several magical objects, helped by an amnesiac girl, Aherne, and several other misfits.

Melling packs the book with just about every medieval Irish text that fit the story she's trying to tell — there's a blending of the stories of Lebor Gabála Érenn and Cath Maige Tuired (a mythological history of Ireland that depicts it as being settled by waves of successive invasions, and the story of a battle between various supernatural beings respectively), and Tuán meic Chairill shows up at one point as well. Of course when I was reading the book as a teenager all these stories were new to me, but rereading it in my thirties after having majored in undergrad, and done an MPhil and PhD in medieval Irish literature (Lebor Gabála was one of the texts I researched for my PhD, in fact), I see the book with different eyes. I had to laugh at the heroine, Kay, learning Old Irish to a level of proficiency that she was able to travel back in time and engage in conversation with people — and this after only one year of study!

The book is long out of print (I think it was first published in the 1980s), but I borrowed it repeatedly from the public library when I was a teenager, and I think it was one of the many formative stories that pushed me towards studying what I studied in university, such that I forgive it for its hackneyed tropes about pre-Christian Ireland in a way that I wouldn't if I read it for the first time now.


23. Made to read at school.
24. Hooked me into reading.
25. Never finished it.
26. Should have sold more copies.
27. Want to be one of the characters.
28. Bought at my fave independent bookshop.
29. The one I have reread most often.
30. Would save if my house burned down.

I have to apologise again for leaving many people's comments unanswered. I will get to them eventually, but the uncertainty and stress about Brexit has pushed me right over the edge. I'm having panic attacks every night when I try to sleep, and so I'm going around in a kind of exhausted fog. I need to preserve all my energy for work. I will try to set aside some time on Sunday to answer people's comments on past posts.

Comments

[shadaras]

<3 take care of yourself first, always. That's really understandable, and I hope that you can find some peace in the middle of this stress -- or at least some rest.

Also that book sounds very cool, both as an inspiration towards your field of study and as something then much more simplistic when you come back to it later. :)

[dolorosa_12]

I'm doing my best. I went along to the huge march yesterday — 1.5 million people! — and even though it felt like shouting into the void and will probably do nothing, it at least helped me feel that my conscience is clear and I'm on the right side of history.

The book really is wonderful, and it's a shame that it's out of print!

[isis]

Hugs to you. I can't imagine the stress. I have quite a few friends in similar situations and they're all upset and worried.

[dolorosa_12]

It's really, really bad, and I wish that so much wasn't depending on politicians to essentially fall on their own swords and sacrifice their own political careers, and the chance of their party being reelected next time around — because that is, literally, the only thing that's going to get us out of this mess. We are on the brink of a national emergency, and the way to stop it is obvious, but no one wants to make the decision that will put the brakes on Brexit, because to do so would be political suicide.

[monksandbones]

I haven't read The Singing Stone, but I loved some of O.R. Melling's other books! think the first one I read was The Hunter's Moon, also a YA portal-ish fantasy set in Ireland, although the one that had the most lasting influence on me (every once in a while I think about posting about it, actually) was her semi-autobiographical Canadian-teenagers-abroad book My Blue Country.

Anyway, it's always exciting to discover someone who read/liked the same children's/YA CanLit as I did!

Also, internet hugs for the Brexit stress.

[dolorosa_12]

It was a complete accident that I discovered The Singing Stone — as you can probably imagine, Canadian children's literature was not very common in Australia! I always feel the same way when someone outside Australia or New Zealand has heard of the authors that I read when growing up.

Thanks for the hugs. It's a really stressful, awful time.