Happy Birthday Jorge Luis Borges

I should really be writing something else today.  After all, I’m in the middle of a blog tour and I haven’t finished writing my guest posts yet.  (*Bites nails*)  But I couldn’t let the 112^th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges go by without writing a quick post about how much his collection of short stories, Ficciones, meant to me when I first read it at age eighteen.

I was spending the summer after my freshman year with a friend on the Greek island of Spetses. Her family had rented a beautiful, secluded house, with stone steps leading down to the Mediterranean Sea.  I don’t know who owned the house, but two months spent chewing through their wonderful book collection was a better education than I had gotten that school year.  I remember that they had a lot of poetry—Yeats and WH Auden and Wallace Stevens—and I remember that many of the books were signed by the author, something that didn’t impress me much when I was eighteen and which, I’m sorry to say, did not deter me from reading them on the beach or shoving them in my purse when I wanted to go to the disco.

I pulled Ficciones off the shelf at random and read the short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”  It changed my life.

For the past five years I had been suffering from reading withdrawal.  I needed more intellectual stimulation than children’s books could give me, but I didn’t want to lose their magic.  At the time, I thought that to be an adult reader was to be doomed to read realistic books.  I don’t have anything against them, mind you, and some of them I love, but I felt that my world had narrowed.  I tried reading fantasy and science fiction but—and this is just because I wasn’t reading the right books—it seemed to me they didn’t have the complexity and great writing I craved.  Ficciones was the first book I read as an adult that convinced me I could read with the same deep sense of wonder I had experienced when I was eight reading the Narnia books or ten reading Ozma of Oz or twelve reading A Wizard of Earthsea.

I won’t tell you what it’s about, mostly because I have to get back to writing those darn guest posts, but I highly recommend that you look up a Borges short story today.  They are strange and wonderful and unlike anything you have read before.

Happy birthday Jorge Luis Borges.