I am at the point with this book where I am not only remembering the scenes and words, I am doubling that over with my memories of myself reading them and feeding off of them, trying to make them a part of my immediate self again. Over the years I have read this book, my favorite character has gone from Maud to Leonora then to both. As it happens, out of this dusty old book pop two unsigned letters written in Ash's unmistakable hand.

Between Piccadilly and Putney, where he lived in the basement of a decaying Victorian house, he progressed through his usual states of somnolence, sick juddering wakefulness, and increasing worry about Val.As they uncover their letters, journals and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany - what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas. Ash asks his daughter to pass on a message to LaMotte that he is happy now, but the little girl forgets to do it.

Possession is certainly not what you would describe as a light read but the combination of the weaving story-lines and the detective part of the plot kept my interest and I ended up finishing this rather weighty book quicker than anticipated. It's the warmth and spirit that Byatt has breathed into her characters rather than their cerebral pursuits that makes us care. Does that mean we can't understand the twentieth century fully, in a world where there was never a Randolph Henry Ash? Ooh look, letters with smart people references in it that I understand, this is so cool that I get even a little of this, yay!I wasn’t in it to find things I had never found before, to revisit a personal classic to explore ideas that I had left behind for the time when I was ready to connect with them in the way that they deserved. This habit of pulling us on with one hand while doing everything she can to divert and distract with the other naturally feeds into that. It is a book about books, but in such a generous way that nearly everything books can be about is in here.

So the golden apple which Hercules first brought back or gathered from Hesperia must have been grain; and the Gallic Hercules with links of this gold, that issue from his mouth, chains men by the ears: something which will later be discovered as a myth concerning the fields. Here he sat, recuperating a dead man's reading, timing his exploration by the library clock and the faint constriction of his belly.I am convinced that you must undertake that grand Fairy Topic--you will make something highly strange and original of it. I loved the movie, but as is so often the case, the book exceeds and fleshes out the characters in ways that only brilliant writing can do. I come home at the end of the day and spend my time trying to reconnect with the other person I know I am and want to continue being.

As ''Possession'' progresses, it seems less and less like the usual satire about academia and more like something by Jorge Luis Borges. This is the sort of read that cleans out all the nonsense from my brain and leaves me with what is essentially important again. So if I construct a fictive eyewitness account- a credible plausible account- am I lending life to truth with my fiction- or verisimilitude to a colossal Lie with my feverish imagination?This time though, I focused on Byatt’s poetry and discovered just how much it enriched and influenced the novel’s dual plots. Whoever considers their library their most important POSSESSION will know the excitement of adding just a single poem's perfect rhythm to a collection already known "by heart", like a part in our blood circulation, as Byatt points out.