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I have to get the terrible title out of the way first, because…anything that turns you away from this book is to be vanquished. The book is amazing: wonderful and moving and humane. And the title: boo. OK, done.

Now: if you haven’t read Joan Silber before, that is sad, because she is fantastic. You open one of her books and a voice greets you, speaks to you, and you are there in another world with another human, as though you have passed through a veil and all is transformed.

I had just read…something else, I can’t even remember what, something that was a little sticky and cloying and complicated. Not bad, just…not welcoming.

But opening the first page was like drinking cool water from a well. I was in the other world. I was hearing about someone’s heart. And mind. And soul.

Oh my god this book is good.

Go. Enjoy.

Full disclosure here: I am querying agents for a novel I am writing, and overall, I feel the less said about this the better. It only makes me alternately hyped up or sad, and neither feeling is really a pond I’m up for swimming in right now. The process is complex and requires attention to tiny details (first 5 pages? 10? 20? 2 Chapters? Three? Does that include the prologue?). It does helpfully remind me though that the best part of writing is … writing. That’s where the joy, though sometimes hard to find, invariably comes.

At any rate, on one of many online forms that asked for length, bio, genre etc, this question jumped out and mugged me:

Who is your favorite fictional character from a book or a movie?

No wrong answers, it promised.

And I mean…yikes. I was flummoxed, fully and completely. First thought: Max, from Where the Wild Things Are.

Except I recognized this more as an aspirational thing, that is, I would like to be more like Max (or, please God, Lynda Barry’s Poodle With a Mohawk), but does that mean favorite?

I tried again. But somehow, when I read a book, I don’t come away with “Oh, how I loved that character!” but more like “Oh, how I loved that book.” It’s the whole world they live in, the transportation to another realm.

Not to mention, of course, that I am putting this onto a form in which I am asking someone, essentially: Please love me and my work. Which is a special and weird kind of pressure.

Jane Austen characters come to mind, because they are so wonderful, but also…I don’t know, that seems crazy? Ditto Levin from Anna Karenina (too show-offy, but I do love him, as I do Pierre). Also: previous centuries seem like they might send, er, the wrong message. And I truly love Karenin as well, one of the painful great characters of literature. Except is he really my favorite? Cue concerns again about wrong century, book, person, life.

I promise I read a lot of contemporary fiction too, but…what am I to say? I loved Gabe in Lucky Us by Joan Silber (read it! It’s so good!) but that felt too inside baseball, and…ugh. Saying anything at all began to feel more and more fraught.

We are such a strange and confusing culture, so focused on trying to know one another and expose ourselves, when trying to do so ends up feeling, inevitably, partial and false. Anyway, I ended up, in a spasm of confused anxiety, saying Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden. Whom I love, truly. And I forgot to add her last name. And I am, as ever, suffused with regrets and confusion.

As is the way with weird and terrible experiences, I will now try to share this question with you guys: Do you, any of you, have a favorite character in fiction? No wrong answers, I promise (ha ha ha sob).

I am, in some ways, a persnickety reader. Not in matters of “taste,” exactly. I like high, low, and in-between. But there are certain things that I take irritable, irrational umbrage at, and in particular: when the narrator is a reader. And not just a reader but a loudly proclaimed lover of Books and Reading and Literature. The descriptive phrase, “She always had her nose in a book,” type of thing.

I am annoyed by my own annoyance in this. Of course the narrator is a reader; we are all readers here, in all likelihood: the writer, the reader, the characters. Even so, there is something about a writer writing rhapsodically and approvingly about a character’s curling up with a book, or the close and personal relationship a character has with other fictional characters. It just makes me say, “No!” Not that I stop reading exactly. I very rarely stop reading altogether, which is a post for another time. But I rebel, secretly, and feel pandered to, and just generally pissed off.

The writer is instantaneously transformed into Mary Bennet for me, like so (this is stolen from here, as for inexplicable reasons all Jane Austen has fled my room): “Far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate such pleasures. They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for me. I should infinitely prefer a book.“

That self-congratulatory air of pleasure with oneself. How did Jane Austen get it so exactly and painfully? But that’s it, that is the person who appears before me.

But—and here’s (part of) the problem: having this bias is definitely as annoying, at least, as self-satisfiedly writing a character with the problem. My only apology/defense is that at least I am not fictional, and have a degree of self-awareness about it all.

The real question I have is: does this bug anyone else?

Let’s say you finish a book. Maybe it’s a book you loved and flew through. Or it was a tough slog, but darn it you made it through! In either case, though, you’re probably heading toward another book. But…do you start it right away?

This is a tricky situation, for me. Especially if it happens at night (can’t start a new book at night, because…well, you just can’t). But you also can’t just go to bed without reading at all, because how can you fall asleep then?

So what works? I lean towards the New Yorker. But I’ve heard other opinions: short stories. Cookbooks (!). Poetry?

The whole problem of it makes me think of Trollope, who apparently finished one novel, then turned the page of his notebook and began the next. Which is…not how I am.

I feel like somewhere out there is the perfect (metaphorical) grapefruit ice that does the thing you need between books: marks a sharp clear end to one, and puts you into a state of washed and receptive openness for your next one.

If you know what this would be, let us know in the comments. I’m having trouble getting from my most recently read book (Heft, very good) to my next one (The Milkman or Amnesty, I can’t decide). (Hey, if you know which one I should read, let me know!)