This book, wow...
There are a handful of books that have been enormously influential in my life, but I think I'll just write about one, and that's Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night.
It was the first Lord Peter mystery that I managed to successfully read--I'd tried Have His Carcase the year before to no avail--and I was hooked. Harriet Vane is a difficult, prickly heroine and Peter Wimsey is the suave sophisticated member of the English aristocracy who wants, quite desperately, to marry her. In Gaudy Night, Harriet goes back to her college at Oxford for a reunion, a Gaudy, and becomes embroiled in a poison pen case that is much more complicated than it initially seems to be.
I read this book for the first time the weekend I took the GRE and it remains my favorite of all the Lord Peter books, for a whole host of reasons, but primarily because of its clear articulation of the fact that women are are absolutely the equal of men and the relationship of equals between Harriet and Peter.
After Gaudy Night, I proceeded to devour most of the rest of the series (I have never managed to finish Five Red Herrings, snooze), and that was that, until a fateful day in September 1998.
I'd been online a lot when I was in college, but after I graduated, I lost my access at school and I ended up taking a two year break online stuff because even after I got out on my own, I couldn't really justify the cost of an internet connection. Until I started dating P.--two months after we started dating, he moved to Nebraska for grad school. Then it suddenly became a justifiable expense (it was either $20 a month for internet or more than that for long distance phone charges!), and I started looking around for some sort of community to belong to, as I was pretty isolated at home--I had some friends, but my interests were not theirs.
I was a pretty heavy reader of mysteries at the time, so I stumbled across Dorothy-L and RUSS-L. Dot-L is a general mystery dicussion list (theoretically; in reality it's a bunch of authors plugging their books, Harriet Klausner posting a daily slew of incoherent book reviews, and a group of increasingly draconian moderators), and RUSS-L is devoted to discussing Laurie R. King's Sherlockian pastiches (and was great fun to read). I looked for a group for Lord Peter, but there wasn't one. Until September 1998, when a post came through one on or both of those lists that a group had been started on Onelist called LordPeter (later hosted by eGroups, and currently hosted by YahooGroups).
Of course I joined. And by doing so, my life has changed immeasurably for the better. People make jokes about only losers finding community online, but you know, there's no way I would ever have met the people I am proud to call my friends if it weren't for LordPeter. As infuriating as the list can be at times (I'm one of the moderators and I maintain the group's website), on the whole, it's a good place. And my friends are utterly fantastic. Everyone I've been able to meet in person from the group has been pretty awesome.
And all because I finally decided to take my best friend's advice and read a Lord Peter book. Funnily enough, I've not been able to convince her to join LordPeter.
