Delaying gratification, and those dreams you sometimes have that are so fantastic and then you wake up and you're like, Oh. And now for real life.

That post title is only three characters (four characters?) shy of being too long for a post title.

I went to the library today to get, I swear, two books, just two, no more than two, a mere two. All I wanted was The Mysteries of Udolpho, which I've been meaning to read for untold ages, and The Monk, which sounds hilarious. The thing was (this was the thing) that as I was turning down the R aisle to fetch Udolpho, my eye was caught by The Persian Boy, which is an excellent book and one that I haven't read for absolutely untold ages – like, seriously, a year and a half – so I paused to eye it affectionately, and then I also spotted The Praise Singer, which is a book by Mary Renault that I have not read.

This is something I do quite frequently with authors I like. Basically if I read two books by an author that I like quite a lot, or one book that I adore and one book that I quite enjoy (not in that order though. It has to be I read one that I quite enjoy and then one that I adore, or otherwise I will think that the author didn't live up to his or her potential in the second book of theirs I read), the Rule of Delayed Author Gratification comes into play. This is the rule whereby I choose one book by a given author of whom I am fond, and I just don't read it. For instance, I am not reading The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie. I am not reading Persuasion by Jane Austen (I have read it before, but not for ages, even longer than I haven't read The Persian Boy). I am not reading The Praise Singer by Mary Renault. For the longest time I didn't read Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones, or Beau Ideal by P.C. Wren, or Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card (that one was SO not worth it), or Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers (ditto. shut UP, Peter Wimsey, ya pussy. The guy was a MURDERER. Quit CRYING.)

I have other delaying gratification tactics too, with authors I actually can't bear not to read. When Diana Wynne Jones wrote Conrad's Fate, I read it to my little sister, and I didn't read ahead. As I read it aloud chapter by chapter, I was reading it for the very first time. When I first got all of the Sandman (I got ALL of them, because my lovely godmother gave me a big gift card to Bongs & Noodles for my birthday), after I decided they were pretty much the best thing ever, I only read one issue a day. And appreciate: I did that for Season of Mists and A Game of You and Brief Lives, not just like Fables and Reflections and World's End, where it wouldn't have made any difference. I began to fail at this when I got to The Kindly Ones, though. I gave in and read them all in one gobble. I had to! Lyta was a CRAZY PERSON!

I know that you are probably thinking this is an insane Rule, but you are totally wrong. Sometimes it's a let-down, but sometimes it's very very worth it. Archer's Goon? Beau Ideal? Can't even express how worth it. And just think if I'd had the luck to save The Ground Beneath Her Feet instead of The Moor's Last Sigh (I almost did this! The only only reason I didn't was that The Moor's Last Sigh was checked out!). And just think how brilliant it would be if I'd reserved Fire and Hemlock for last, or Neverwhere. It is just a question of guessing the right book to read.

Anyway, so I stopped to look at The Praise Singer, to decide if the Time Was Ripe for ending the delaying of my gratification, and what do you think? There were all these books by Mary Renault I'd never heard of before! Like four of them! And one about after Alexander died (poor Bagoas), which I'm assuming isn't very good or else my mum would have recommended it to me and owned it, but still! Hey!

This is like those dreams that everyone who likes books a lot seems to have, where you go to the library and there is a whole shelf of hitherto unknown books by an author you really like, or you go to a book sale and they have all the books you like, or you discover a new wondrous author who has written ten thousand books.

But this is real. Indeed Mary Renault does have a whole bunch of books I haven't read before. Eeee! I'm trying not to get my hopes up though, because I know that many times an author does not reach his or her writing peak right away, and there are consequently a vast number of books by them that are not very good at all, even though their later books are excellent, and other times an author is just all over the place and sometimes her books are very, very good and sometimes they are boring shite (I'm looking at you, Rumer Godden).

Addendum: I looked up Mary Renault on Wikipedia to make sure that these were indeed her books, and do you know what I discovered? I discovered that she and her partner that she was with her whole life moved to South Africa where there was apparently a lovely and accepting expatriate gay community, and they joined the anti-apartheid movement. In the 1950s. And hardly any white people were in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1950s. Yay for Mary Renault. It is pleasant to discover that one's favorite authors were also nice people. Usually I look people up on the internet and discover unpleasant things about them, like Sean Connery thinking women needed to be smacked and kept in their places, and Nabokov being all, you know, snobby and uppity, and, ugh, Rumer Godden refused to give medicine to a little dying girl who then died, and things like that. But Mary Renault was a righteous lady, and The Persian Boy particularly is an extremely well-written and touching book; and I think more people should know about her, because she was a good writer and it sounds to me like a good person.