Thinking About Books: Rose Daughter

The last few book posts have been about books I just read and had a lot to say about because they were making my mind churn in that delicious way that signals to me "This is a good book." This one is a little different in that it's also one of my all-time favorite, mind-altering, life-changing books and has been since I was 12 or 13.

Rose Daughter is an English garden of a book: cultivated and orderly profusions of flowery chaos. Every time I read it it's like being in a beautiful, lucid fever-dream. Everything is described with gorgeous language. This book sort of defines the word gorgeous for me; not merely "very beautiful," but, "adorned with rich or brilliant colours; sumptuously gay or splendid; magnificent." (Many thanks to the OED.) The gorgeousness of Rose Daughter reminds me that the word shares a root with gorge and engorge, words that mean a delicious amount of too much of something. You could distill the actual things that happen in this book to about four chapters, but instead you get over 200 pages of pure linguistic delight.

I don't remember what I thought when I first read it. I was in Middle School, and Middle School was Hell. I probably was only grateful that it provided an unusually wonderful escape from my life, which is what books were to me then (and still are). Little vacations from life. Rose Daughter is less like going to the beach and more like going into a coma (in a good way). There are some books that almost literally immerse me, to the point that I have to fight my way to the surface and gasp for air when I must come out of them for food or sleep. This is one of them. I read it when I'm sick, in body or in mind, and I come out of it refreshed and strengthened. I believe this was the book that first showed me that words could be put to beautiful purpose. I won't say I wasn't writing before I read it, but I believe most things I've written after have been affected by it. There is a vague standard of quality off in the hazy distance that I try to pursue in my writing, and when I think about it more closely, Rose Daughter is really what I'm striving for. That sumptuous profusion is what I'd like, at least in small measure, to put in my writing. To not merely tell a story, but to tell it gorgeously. I hope I can come half so close.