Why are Books Memorable?

This one, of course, came from my RockStories writing blog and landed to my post explaining why I couldn't answer the question, "What the best book you've ever read?" I'm not sure whether the question is about why we generally remember books or what makes a particular book memorable, but I'm partial to the second interpretation--so partial that I've been looking forward to answering this question since I first noticed it in my search results more than a week ago.

Before I do, though, I have to say that the answer is undoubtedly different for everyone. I've been bored to tears by books that I know have a lot of objective merit (Tolkein, anyone?) and know that some very discerning readers just can't see what keeps me going back to re-read The Sun Also Rises every couple of years. Reasonable opinions may vary.

For me, though, the thing that makes a book significant is that it brings something to my attention that I hadn't thought about before. Usually that's not a revolutionary change, a kind of "Wow, I've been looking at this all wrong!" kind of epiphany, but a matter of being consciously confronted with something that is obviously true once it's been placed before us, but that we hadn't ever acknowledged before--or perhaps consciously noticed at all.

Recently, for instance, I was reading Jon Hassler's North of Hope, and I ran across a passage in which the housekeeper in a rectory suggests that an aging priest has lost his mind because he claims to have seen an angel. "Don't you believe in angels?" another priest asks her. She says that she does, but that believing in them and seeing them are two different things, and that's what sets Christians apart from lunatics.

When I read that passage, I laughed out loud, as I often do when surprised by obvious truth. Isn't that the common view, though it's not always spoken aloud (or perhaps even understood in so many words)? Isn't the world full of people who believe in angels, but would never in a million years believe that you'd seen one? And did you ever really think about the fact that they were the same people, until you read these words? I didn't, until I read Hassler's words.

The great thing is that these revelations can come from anywhere, be found in any kind of book, and don't require great literary prowess or National Book Awards. And once we've tripped over one, our thinking never quite snaps back to exactly where it was before. That, I think, is what makes a book memorable--one's just reading along, carefree as can be, and BOOM: for the rest of your life you know something, or see something, that you didn't know or see before.