don’t demand perfection from my books; I read because there are enough truly magical books–transportive and transcendent–out there that one out of ten or twenty really rocks my world.  At the rate that I read, that means I get one or two a month.  And of the books that don’t hit the magical mark, well more than half of them are enjoyable and interesting.  So reading is a lovely lottery; I almost always win, and sometimes I win big.

But there is a level of book beyond the magical.  These are the books that don’t just take over my conscious mind.  Once I pick them up, they seem to conquer the farthest reaches of my nervous system, from my brain stem down to the nerves in my toes.  They go beyond mere transport.  And the amazing thing, afterwards, is that I cannot figure out one thing that is wrong with the book.  Not a single thing.  This is a perfect book, and there are not so many of those in this world.  I think I find one once every three or four years.

To give you an idea how picky I am about applying this label, I want to talk about a book that I think is utterly magical, brilliant, incredible . . . and not perfect.  Loretta Chase’s “Lord of Scoundrels”:  Not perfect.  Almost, but that bit at the end with the fight for the Macguffin is just a little over the top, and while I think Jessica is a fantastic heroine, she has almost no character arc.  All the growth is Dain’s.  Or Susan Elizabeth Phillip’s “Ain’t She Sweet?”  Smart, sassy, funny, clever, heart-warming . . . but Sugar Beth wanting the painting for the mentally-challenged daughter of her former husband always struck me as just a tad too saccharine for the rest of the book.  I’m not trying to criticize either of these books–I’m just saying that in my nomenclature, even the books at the very highest pinnacle usually miss the mark of perfection.

But there are perfect books.

The Chosen, by Chaim Potok.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams.

Memory, by Lois McMaster Bujold.

A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett.

Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay.

Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart.

And I am now delighted to be add another book to the list:  The Host, by Stephenie Meyer.  I was expecting this book to be interesting and engrossing.  I had hoped it would be magical.  I got perfection.  Absolute, utter perfection.  So go read this one.  It might not sound like something you want to read–it’s a semi-dystopian science fiction for adults, with something that is either a love triangle or a love quadrangle, depending on whether you count bodies (3) or souls (4).  And it is utterly, completely, heart-stoppingly brilliant.