I Don’t Like Sand. It’s Coarse, and Rough, and Irritating — and It Gets Everywhere.

The Dark Side was Anakin’s Siren Song — here’s mine.

Stop and think for a moment: What calls to you?

What really, really calls to you — and no matter what you do, you can’t escape it?

I’m not talking about your home, your children, parents, friends, or your job, I’m talking deeper.

It might even be so deep that you haven’t thought about it — but it reappears ever so often to remind you that it’s there. Maybe you haven’t thought about it until right now.

Sirens would sing to lure sailors to their doom in Greek mythology, and throughout my life I’ve heard my very own Siren songs.

For me they are objects, people, books, time periods, ideas, concepts, and most often — places.

Sometimes I follow, and sometimes I forget.

The thing is, it’ll always come back for you when you’re ready.

Sometimes it feels dangerous, thrilling, and perhaps it feels like comfortable, like home.

It might even feel like both.

For me, this particular Siren song began in college — with a book. It was the most unexpected journey to self-discovery that I had experienced up until that point.

Of course, it started with the fact that I had not been keeping up with our required reading as an English major, so I had to cram and read the entire book in one day — six hours, to be exact, so that my final paper wasn’t late.

I did something strange with this book due to the time crunch:

I would write down the chapter number, then summarize the plot beneath each number in bullet points so that I wouldn’t forget it, since, my brain was inevitably about to be overloaded.

This might be normal to some to take notes while reading, but for me, I was an avid, carefree reader — of books that I chose, not books that an institution told me to read so that I’d get good grades.

My brain would create the pictures and the timeline, so I never had to worry about jotting things down when I was reading books for myself.

I still have the notes that I took somewhere, and I like to look back on them from time to time to try and understand the magic of that first read, but I can’t.

That’s the crazy thing — once you have that first read, you can never go back and understand it the same way again — but you also don’t realize in the moment that it’s going to be magical to you later.

This book was called Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru.

It spans a few hundred years and weaves in and out of stories told about the same place, about different people in separate time periods.

If you look at the Amazon reviews, you’ll see that it’s confounding to virtually everyone — whether it’s frustration or awe. Either way, it has a mythical quality that I can only compare to a Siren’s song. It made me look inward, and caused a bizarre desire to go to the desert to see what I could find out about myself.

I want to read the book to go places with the characters — physically and emotionally — but I also want to get in my car and drive to the Mojave.

I remember finding it hard to exist in the real world — away from the book — after it was over, but I also couldn’t go back.

I pushed it aside, until I came across another book years later that gave me a very familiar, similar feeling while listening to the audiobook.

(It’s also narrated by Jeremy Irons, so that definitely doesn’t hurt.)

…It’s The Alchemist.

If you’ve read it, you know.

If you’ve read part of it, but you don’t really understand what all the fuss is about — maybe check it out again when it feels right.

If you haven’t read it — now is a great time to have it sitting on your shelf. When it’s time to open it up, you’ll know.

This book is about a boy who goes on a journey that none of us have ever been on — yet we’ve all been on it before.

It is also one of the only books that changes every time I read or listen to it, and I find myself wondering if I missed that part before, or if it just applies to me in a different way.

It also involves a different type of desert — this one is the type of sand that would make Anakin Skywalker cringe, whereas Gods Without Men is more of a rocky, Star Trek type landscape.

It has an old-world charm that I crave, but I can only pick it back up at certain times — and it tells me when.

I’ve found pieces of myself in these books — so much so that I have a call to visit the desert. The part that I haven’t figured out yet is which desert, where this is, and when I should go.

I forget about it for periods of time, so it’s not something I constantly ponder, but when it does return I wonder — where is this hiding, and why have these collections of words had such an impact on me?

It has been put off because I’m busy, but also because I’m not ready to find out yet. Perhaps there’s a third book — or a fourth, or fifth. Maybe there are many different stops on this journey to find the answer, and I’m apprehensive but excited to find out where it’ll take me.

Now I want to know… what is your Siren?

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