Tam Lin
Pamela Dean
468 pages
published in 1991

If you had asked me , when I was eight or nine or so, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would've answered that I wanted to be a student. Didn't matter what kind of study, as long as I could study. All through secondary school I strived to be good enough to go to uni even if I still didn't know what I wanted to study. Then I finally did and reality turned out to be ..different from what I expected.

Tam Lin is a novel for people who dream of university, who'd love to be able to study all their lives without ever having to graduate. The setting, a small (fictitious) midwestern liberal arts college is loveningly described. All through the book the love of reading, of studying for the sake of studying shines through and it's this that made this book a bit of a cult success. If you're susceptible to the romance of college as an enchanted garden of learning, this is the book for you.

The plot is in this less important and could be described as a slow moving, spun out version of the old folktale with the same title. Since Tam Lin was written for Terri Windling's series of modern recreations of classic fairy tales. A young woman named Janet starts university at Blackstock College and gets captivated in strange circumstances surrounding a few of the older students...

To give a small taste of the feel of the book, I'll quote the opening paragraph.

The year Janet started at Blackstock College, the Office of Residental Life had spent the summer removing from all the dormitories the old wooden bookcases that, once filled with books, fell over unless wedge. Chase and Phillip's A New Introduction to Greek was the favorite instrument for wedging; majors in the Classics used the remedial math textbook, but this caused the cases to develop a slight backward tilt, so that doughnuts, pens, student indentification cards, or concert tickets placed on top of them slid with indistinguishable slowness backward and eventually vanished dustily behind. The generally harried air of most Classics majors was attributed by their friends and roommates entirely to their reliance on an inferior wedging system for their bookcases.

Recommended to anybody who wants to read more of the above paragraph.