I have read many, many books.

Not as many as some, to be clear. My wife used to read in the shower. I'm forbidden to explain how she kept the pages dry, but I assure you she did. Her mom was at one point even more voracious. My e-friend John is going to smash 75 books this year, after reading more than a hundred  last year. I am no longer in that league.

I used to be, though. Pre-internet, it was routine of me to read about two novels a week for many years. That began as an escape from the dark emotional energies swirling around downstairs and so you think you can imagine just how deep into a book little Kenny could get.

You have no idea.

I once missed a school bus because I was reading. There were at least seven other kids at the stop with me when I opened the book. When I next looked up I was alone. I can only assume the other kids whispering to each other to ignore me. I have no explanation for why the bus driver didn't get my attention except it's all too easy to imagine a honking horn, shouts, and little Kenny oblivious to all of it. It's hard to get my attention when only my body is in this world. That bus driver would have had to disembark and bodily haul me aboard. I can't say as my parents were understanding.

The internet radically altered my reading habits, mostly to my detriment. I still read as many words as I ever did, and probably more. I read much more widely and much, MUCH less deeply. Surfing is such an apt verb to describe what we all do online: our point of contact with the vast and deep informocean is a board 2.38 inches thick.

The world's energies are starting to resemble my childhood kitchen's. Let's all hope the missileplates and bulletglasses don't start flying where we can see them. It's bad enough they're flying where many of us refuse to acknowledge them or their damage.  (We are, however, all too good at picking sides.) And the internet amplifies and distorts the darkness into something even more malevolent. I am curating my internet experience ever more carefully, engaging mostly only with friends, increasingly unwilling to spend much time where the flamewars rage. There are safer and more profitable ways to keep warm. 

I never stopped reading novels, but I retreated into the safe and familiar authors for the most part. Guy Gavriel Kay. Greg Iles. Stephen King. Robert Harris. Gary Jennings. And of course Spider Robinson. There were some one-offs in the rotation: Robert J. Sawyer's NEANDERTHAL PARALLAX, James Garber's VERTICAL RUN, and James L Halperin's THE TRUTH MACHINE, along with a couple of Heinlein's lesser known novels. 

I'm broadening again. There are just so many alternate  worlds to escape into. I just read a book about that very topic, in fact, and it's reverberating. It's going to do that for a long, long time.

Is Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, the best book I've ever read?

It's certainly one of them.

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I actually did read Clarke's first novel, JOHNATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL, and enjoyed it immensely. It's a giant, sprawling work of magical archaism: actual magicians feuding in Regency England. It was predictably marketed as "Harry Potter for adults", which it emphatically is not..but it's an astonishing debut.

PIRANESI is worlds above it. And less than a third its length.But my God, there's a World in here. 

I have been musing on prerational thought, about a childlike sense of wonder and what might or might not be visible with that mindset. I want into this novel almost completely blind -- but I came to feel very quickly as if my subconscious mind had pre-selected the book just to complement my thoughts. That is a delightful feeling.

The titular character lives in a seemingly infinite House, a labyrinth crammed with statues which Piranesi considers to be friends even if they never speak to him. He feels the same way about the thirteen skeletons he's found -- the Folded Up Child, the Biscuit-Box Man, the People of the Alcove-- to whom he brings offerings. He lives on the ground floor: in the basement is an ocean, the tides of which Piranesi has meticulously worked out so he knows when he has to move to higher ground. He's also catalogued the House and its Statues (the capitalization of nouns and occasional other words important to Piranesi pervades the text), calling himself "the Beloved Child of the House". He knows of only one other living person, whom he fittingly calls "The Other", and who is very different from Piranesi. Our protagonist calls him a friend, but we know better straight away. The Other is a manipulative asshole. He's also quite clearly of our world, not Piranesi's. 

As a reader, you are very deliberately left to flounder at the beginning. Where are we? Is this real?  How is it Piranesi seems to have referents for every Statue? He knows almost nothing of himself, not even his name, which is not Piranesi....that's only what "The Other" calls him. The real Piranesi in our world was an Italian artist who specialized in depicting intricate labyrinthine prisons offers a clue. 

He knows what every Statue represents, but has a very questionable and gap-filled memory otherwise. He has no idea how he came to be in the House and doesn't care: the House is the World and the World is the House. Piranesi lives a poor hardscrabble existence but it's UNFAILINGLY framed positively, lovingly. His every experience at first, he bends positive, and without a single nag or any semblance of a preachy tone,  he comes to make you see things his way. This is one of the gentle miracles of this peaceful, meditative novel. I was repulsed by the setting at the beginning, considering it a massive obstacle to overcome: indeed I thought that was the point of the novel. I was wrong. I was very, very wrong. 

Piranesi finds out there is another person in the House, another live person he calls "16" (1 through 15 are Piranesi himself, the Other, and the skeletons). The Other warns Piranesi never to associate with 16 on pain of madness.

Needless to say, nothing is as it seems.

I don't want to spoil this and it's very hard not to. You may grow impatient with Piranesi's piecing his identity, surroundings,  and events together, but you can't help but love the character: he's curious, intelligent, and all-around GOOD, almost to a fault. 

The last page of this novel packs a roundhouse punch. I bawled for a whole after finishing it. Then I spent, and am spending, time thinking about how this novel will make me more attentive, more conscious, more understanding, more benevolent. As if I am living in the House. Because I am: we all are. 

I can't ask any more of a novel than that.

PIRANESI is one of those books I firmly believe everyone should read. It's particularly relevant to anyone who feels trapped by trauma or disease, or who has lost the thread of their lives and forgotten what it all might mean. I will be gifting this one.

Thank you, Susanna Clarke.