Neverness

I found my copy of Neverness at a church bring-and-buy sale around 1993. I don't remember if it was the cover that caught my eye or if the person selling their books (for mere pennies towards the church roof) persuaded me to buy it. What I do remember it that I LOVED it, I read it and reread it from the age of 15 till the end of my teens. I remember pleading with my friends to read it but they never managed to make it through the 600+ pages. They didn't get the beauty of mathematics and become obsessed with the poetry of Blake. In my whole lifetime I have met only one other who has read and loved this book.
At 16 I wrote a letter to David Zindell (never sent and now lost) crying out my praises. I wrote my own sci-fi stories (terrible, plagiarised and thankfully also lost) inspired by his words and worlds. This was my favourite book, of then but of all time?
It's been over 20 years since I last read Neverness and nearly 25 years since I first read it. I was wary to pick up the old pages and return there, would I still feel as much as I did then (for, like many a teen-ager, I felt too much)? Had I changed too much to fall through the stars with Mallory and return to the Devaki?
I need not have feared. This is still my favourite book. Perhaps I have become cruel and callous as in the past the pages had choked me to tears but over these few days I barely sniffed. But I still felt, I was there among them all yet again, careening across the ice or floating in the belly of their lightships. I understood so much more, words that I had assumed were alien invention suddenly had new meaning when I saw their roots (although I had a dictionary by my bed when I read as a teen it was puny in comparison to Zindell's vocabulary and there was no Google to quickly check a word or fact).
I cannot describe this book, what it meant to me or why I still love it. All I can do is implore you to read it, to give yourselves up to it and let it open your mind to the universe.

“What good is a warrior without a war, a poet without a poem”.