Does it feel better in that cold Boston weather?
WHRB was on fire when ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch picked me up from South Station, blessedly with roast beef sandwiches which we ate parked in the blowing rain beside the Fort Point Channel. I enjoyed the Backfires' "Dressed for a Funeral" (2024), Kingfisher (MI)'s "Reichenbach Falls" (2022), and 22° Halo's "Bird Sanctuary" (2024), but Diet Cig's "Harvard" (2017) is one of the funniest choices the station could have made short of Tom Lehrer's "Subway Song" (1944).
The catch of compiling that hundred books meme is that my library remains overwhelmingly in storage, meaning that I am waiting to find out which books of formative importance to the inside of my head got left off the list. [edit: Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous (1955), for one. Andre Norton's The Zero Stone (1968), for another. Clare Bell's Ratha's Creature (1983). Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard (1975). Maybe I should make another list.] I excluded plays, poetry, most nonfiction, and confined myself to one book per author even in cases where I read shelves of them and hunted their work through new and used book stores for years. It's heavily biased toward childhood and adolescence and even then I had to prune in order to be able to reach college before running out of slots. I feel bad about sidelining Wilkie Collins, I figure Tolkien can take it. Please feel free to ask me about any books which you do not see on this list, or any which you do, for that matter.
Hestia sniffed my hands all over and then pressed her head against my fingers in such a fashion as to self-scritch, her recognized and imperious demand for petting which I granted, glad she had forgiven the scent of strange cats and a whole lot of train. My seatmate from New York to Boston asked if I would be more comfortable if he masked and then did so for the remainder of the trip, making him the first person since I started cautiously traveling again even to ask the question. He seemed very surprised when I told him so. It was just human.
spatch picked me up from South Station, blessedly with roast beef sandwiches which we ate parked in the blowing rain beside the Fort Point Channel. I enjoyed the Backfires' "Dressed for a Funeral" (2024), Kingfisher (MI)'s "Reichenbach Falls" (2022), and 22° Halo's "Bird Sanctuary" (2024), but Diet Cig's "Harvard" (2017) is one of the funniest choices the station could have made short of Tom Lehrer's "Subway Song" (1944).The catch of compiling that hundred books meme is that my library remains overwhelmingly in storage, meaning that I am waiting to find out which books of formative importance to the inside of my head got left off the list. [edit: Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous (1955), for one. Andre Norton's The Zero Stone (1968), for another. Clare Bell's Ratha's Creature (1983). Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard (1975). Maybe I should make another list.] I excluded plays, poetry, most nonfiction, and confined myself to one book per author even in cases where I read shelves of them and hunted their work through new and used book stores for years. It's heavily biased toward childhood and adolescence and even then I had to prune in order to be able to reach college before running out of slots. I feel bad about sidelining Wilkie Collins, I figure Tolkien can take it. Please feel free to ask me about any books which you do not see on this list, or any which you do, for that matter.
Hestia sniffed my hands all over and then pressed her head against my fingers in such a fashion as to self-scritch, her recognized and imperious demand for petting which I granted, glad she had forgiven the scent of strange cats and a whole lot of train. My seatmate from New York to Boston asked if I would be more comfortable if he masked and then did so for the remainder of the trip, making him the first person since I started cautiously traveling again even to ask the question. He seemed very surprised when I told him so. It was just human.
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What were the near-misses? I just realized I forgot The Sword in the Stone (1938).
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I am doing too many other things right now to be able to procrastinate on making a list of my own, but I keep being tempted to, in part because it seems like a very nice way to procrastinate. Mostly bookwise I am just filled with elation at seeing one of my favourite students walk into my room the other day with her nose buried in a copy of The Pushcart War, which she claims to have already read four or five times. I am bringing in my copy today since I think some of the dates have been changed across editions --she was all like "oh yes, it takes place in 2036" and I was all "I think that's bullshit but I will check" and indeed, that was the date in hers, where mine says 1986. Fabulous!
~Sor
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I read it in high school and still love it. The fact that I had by that point read so many other retellings of Tam Lin made its genre savvy particularly effective.
Mostly bookwise I am just filled with elation at seeing one of my favourite students walk into my room the other day with her nose buried in a copy of The Pushcart War, which she claims to have already read four or five times.
I forgot that one, too! The version I read first, the future history started in 1976. I don't think I realized it was still being shifted forward in time! I am also glad your student loves it.
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I know the first of those, but not the second! Tell me about it?
Devil on My Back was almost certainly my introduction to its assorted tropes of computerized dystopia: I read it for the first time in sixth grade and then not again for decades until Chaz Brenchley sent me a copy from the UK. I read the Isis trilogy about a year later when I discovered it in my middle school library, but it never stuck the same way.
Also I really should read Two Bit Heroes; I loved City of Diamond and wish she’d done more in that universe but I guess being a famous scriptwriter was significantly more lucrative.
I believe she also had publishing difficulties: Two-Bit Heroes is the second of a three-book series that was not intended to be a trilogy, even though it was collected as such at least once. It's my favorite of the three, but I recommend the set. I just wish there had been at least a fourth in it!
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I never knew about Mr Bass’s Planetoid! We had the first - it would be on my list if I’d remembered - and I think the third, which I assumed was the second.
I suspect I read A Verse From Babylon because you recommended it once, and if so, thank you!
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You are now the second person I have ever met who's read it! It was in the house when I was growing up, so I read it early; it became part of the substrate of Arthuriana whose degree of weirdness I could not accurately gauge at the time. Speaking of which, I can't believe I forgot Bryher's Visa for Avalon (1965). I should at least have considered Peter Dickinson's Merlin Dreams (1988).
A different population: ‘Books that were around so much that I have a feeling of knowing them even if I didn’t much notice what was in them.’ Further down the list in the same category is The Stones Are Hatching. I don’t know why I never read it, but I know why I carried it between at least three houses: that beautiful cover.
It lives up to the cover in my opinion. Its Mad Sweeney is particularly good.
I never knew about Mr Bass’s Planetoid! We had the first - it would be on my list if I’d remembered - and I think the third, which I assumed was the second.
If you assumed that Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet was the second, you were right: Mr Bass' Planetoid is the third of the series. Again it was in the house, so I jumped to it directly from The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet and it was instantly my favorite and has remained so, although Tiime and Mr. Bass is also a strong entry in the weird Arthuriana stakes.
I suspect I read A Verse From Babylon because you recommended it once, and if so, thank you!
You're welcome! That makes me very happy to hear.
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As was The Winter Prince. Can a book be formative even if you read it in your thirties? It was definitely SOMETHING.
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It is! It is an experience I continue to revisit, but I also respect just leaving Boyd McDonald to it.
As was The Winter Prince. Can a book be formative even if you read it in your thirties? It was definitely SOMETHING.
Absolutely! I put books on that list that I have read within the last twelve months because of the impressions they made on me and the windows they opened up into kinds of writing I had not encountered previously, which makes me realize I should have included Robert Scully's A Scarlet Pansy (1932) for just those reasons.
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I still haven't managed the book covers meme yet! And if I wer really to write a list of formative books not just formative fiction I'd have to include some British cookbooks whose titles I can't recall and a book set which retold the Christian Bible for children, with luminous illustrations and all due bowdlerizing.
Oh man I remember Ratha's Creature.
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I skipped the book covers meme entirely! I would love to see your formative not-all-fiction mix. And just realized from your comment I forgot Madhur Jaffrey's Seasons of Splendour (1985). Maybe I should not have tried to construct this meme while recovering from nine hours of travel.
Oh man I remember Ratha's Creature.
In high school I acquired a stuffed animal which said on the tag that it was an infant cheetah, but I looked at its spots and took it home as a cub of the Named.
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I think it would be interesting to tally whether I read them when I was older/younger. Hm, maybe pre-rasfw and rasfw+ would be a good dividing line for me.
Any reason you can't do multiple flavors of the list?
Do you think the D'Aulaire's book on Norse gods and myths is still a good read? Is there a better, elementary intro?
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That's fair. For about seven or eight years, I read almost every McCaffrey I could get my hands on, so picking an important one was almost like throwing darts. It was either going to be this one or Dragonsdawn (1988) or Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern (1983), whose cover thrillingly obsessed me for years before I read it. I should have put something by Roger Zelazny on this list.
I think it would be interesting to tally whether I read them when I was older/younger. Hm, maybe pre-rasfw and rasfw+ would be a good dividing line for me.
You should! Doing two lists like that could be fascinating.
Any reason you can't do multiple flavors of the list?
Because it took time and I am not designed by nature to create canons? I am much more likely to write a sort of supplement for this journal based on all the books that are returning to mind in comments.
Do you think the D'Aulaire's book on Norse gods and myths is still a good read? Is there a better, elementary intro?
To your first question, yes. I love its illustrations: its red-headed Loki wreathed in the fire of his changing shapes is almost definitive for me. And it's not insultingly written. To your second, I don't know a better introduction. I refused on principle to check out Gaiman's Norse Mythology (2017) because I hated his handling of Norse myth in Season of Mists (1992) and American Gods (2001) so much. Stephen Fry has been doing a great job with Greek myth starting with Mythos (2017), but unlike the D'Aulaires I don't think has any Norse volumes to complement. Byatt's Ragnarok (2011) is great Ragnarok, but by definition not so much the rest of the cycle. I read in elementary school a bunch of different translations of sagas which were more adult and complete than the D'Aulaires, but at this date I have no idea whose they were.
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52/100, strictly, although if one does the thing where book = representative of author's catalog, it's more like 70/100; you read far more deeply and broadly across genres than I do and then you mention cool books and then I read them! You are doing God's work, clearly.
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It's not cheating! And of course it stayed with me: (a) it's good (b) it fucks.
52/100, strictly, although if one does the thing where book = representative of author's catalog, it's more like 70/100; you read far more deeply and broadly across genres than I do and then you mention cool books and then I read them! You are doing God's work, clearly.
Thank you! I'm glad! Many titles here are in fact metonymic for their authors, although obviously all with some emotional distinction in their own right. The DWJ was a really hard call between Howl's Moving Castle (1986), The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988), and this one. I should have included Joel Lane's Where Furnaces Burn (2012).
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Fair enough!
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I remember talking to you about Sydney Carton, and I'm happy to see A Tale of Two Cities as your one Dickens. It would probably have been my second if I'd included more than one.
Kingdoms of Elfin <3
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On the other hand, choosing one book per author seems to have decreased my chances of matching with other readers, so maybe I should have just let my list stand with massive inclusions of Diana Wynne Jones and Tanith Lee and Anne McCaffrey and Mary Renault. Oh, my God, I forgot Mollie Hunter.
I remember talking to you about Sydney Carton, and I'm happy to see A Tale of Two Cities as your one Dickens. It would probably have been my second if I'd included more than one.
Thank you! I'll have to check your list out! I missed a bunch of people's while traveling.
Kingdoms of Elfin
Technically my introduction to Sylvia Townsend Warner was "The Duke of Orkney's Leonardo" (1976), but then I had to track down the rest of the Elfin stories and so it was the first book I read of hers and still the one I love best.
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18/100, although in some cases I have read other books by the same authors and some of the sff I've never heard of looks fascinating!! *does my usual grumble about UK/US SFF divides*
And I don't remember Devil on My Back so well (I had to go look it up, and I'm pretty sure I must have read it, it does sound very familiar), but Monica Hughes was an omission from my list - I knew there was someone else in YA SF that I'd read who ought to be there as well as Nicholas Fisk. Probably it would have been Invitation to the Game for me had I recalled and been willing to give some other things the push, heh, but it's hard to decide at this remove.
I did actually think about putting Mythago Wood on my list, too - I read and re-read it in the early 1990s, at the same time as I picked up the Louise Cooper books. It was one of those books where I'm not entirely sure how much I liked it, but where that was entirely irrelevant to the sheer fascination with its compelling weirdness.
Getting films up to 100 was tough; whittling down the books to 100 much harder!
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It's part of the reason it's ridiculous that I spend this much time with movies. For more than half my life they were an intensely secondary art form—I could be using that time to read!
18/100, although in some cases I have read other books by the same authors and some of the sff I've never heard of looks fascinating!!
Enjoy if and whenever you read it! What were the other books by the same authors? I am apparently collecting near-misses.
And I don't remember Devil on My Back so well (I had to go look it up, and I'm pretty sure I must have read it, it does sound very familiar), but Monica Hughes was an omission from my list - I knew there was someone else in YA SF that I'd read who ought to be there as well as Nicholas Fisk. Probably it would have been Invitation to the Game for me had I recalled and been willing to give some other things the push, heh, but it's hard to decide at this remove.
That one I don't think I read! Having looked it up, I feel I would remember the game-to-reality twist, especially if I had encountered it before Ender's Game (1985).
I did actually think about putting Mythago Wood on my list, too - I read and re-read it in the early 1990s, at the same time as I picked up the Louise Cooper books. It was one of those books where I'm not entirely sure how much I liked it, but where that was entirely irrelevant to the sheer fascination with its compelling weirdness.
My actual favorite by Robert Holdstock is Lavondyss (1988), but since I read Mythago Wood first—I picked them up as a mass-market paperback pair from a used book store I used to walk by on the way home from my summer teaching job in college—it's the one that blew the top of my head off.
Getting films up to 100 was tough; whittling down the books to 100 much harder!
Who has just one hundred important books?! (I'm not sure I'm even going to try to make a film list. Contrarily, it would be heavily biased toward the last ten to twenty years.)
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My thoughts exactly! Whenever I make lists, I always realise that I've left out important things after I'm done! XD
I only match with you on 7 of 100, not counting when we match on authors but not on specific books!
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I feel like half the list needs reordering! I kept talking with people and thinking of books!
I only match with you on 7 of 100, not counting when we match on authors but not on specific books!
If you don't mind my asking, which other books?
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I don't think it's embarrassing! I've been really interested by the individuality of all of these lists among a group of people who demonstrably have enough in common to have frequent conversations about books. It's definitely not a monoculture.
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Nine
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We do!
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OH MY GOD I HAD NO IDEA THANK YOU.
(It's catchy, too. I am now listening to rest of the Cindy Lee Berryhill I own. Please tell her.)
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Personally I appreciate that there are. I will check your list out!
(George MacDonald? I discovered him around the same time as Chesterton and should probably have put Lilith (1895) on this list. I forgot so many books.)
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One you have on your list that I haven't noticed on other lists, but that meant a lot to me, too, is Brian Froud's Faeries. How I lost myself in that! Whole worlds and stories in those pictures.
Blessings on your seatmate (which, hilariously, I first read as "seamate"--IDK, maybe the train ride also included an ocean? Traveling in your compartment? IT COULD HAPPEN)
I intend to enjoy myself checking out your music in slow time...
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I am realizing that I do not especially care about the stats in this meme, but I love how much conversation about books and other formative stories it is sparking. The patterns are really neat, too.
One you have on your list that I haven't noticed on other lists, but that meant a lot to me, too, is Brian Froud's Faeries. How I lost myself in that! Whole worlds and stories in those pictures.
Yes! I was obsessed in high school with Froud's art for that book and his illustrations for Patricia McKillip's Something Rich and Strange (1994), a book which would also have had a strong shot at this list if I hadn't chosen her Riddle-Master trilogy instead.
Blessings on your seatmate (which, hilariously, I first read as "seamate"--IDK, maybe the train ride also included an ocean? Traveling in your compartment? IT COULD HAPPEN)
That too would have been cool!
I intend to enjoy myself checking out your music in slow time...
Whenever! I really like radio.
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I too wrestled. I went with The Gammage Cup because I read it first by a number of years and because of Mingy.
I had Mythago Wood on my shelf all through growing up and somehow never got around to actually reading it; someday.
See above re loving Lavondyss more, but I recommend them both! (There are other books in the series, I just don't feel as strongly about any of them except for the title novella of the collection The Bone Forest. In fairness, I have never read the last novel in the cycle, Avilion.)
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Enjoy! What did we mostly match on?
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Agreed.
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...
And on "Dressed for a Funeral"--excellent excellent rocking song! (And the video featured a union jack in the record store--and "Harvard" featured one on one of the girls' helmets, so now I'm going to look for union jacks in the other videos...)
... No union jacks in "Bird Sanctuary," alas, but some fine fine pigeons and flower blossoms.
And "Reichenbach Falls" is just the album cover, boo! Well, nevertheless, half your new finds had union jacks! And I enjoyed listening to all of them.
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I'm glad! I knew the last song was the odd man out in terms of video, but it did not seem to have one. "Harvard" has been persistently stuck in my head.
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I think I would have some trouble sorting through which DWJones books count, and while I think Return to Oz (the Baum one) should get its' own heading, the Oz books in general ought to have a group listing, as should The Dark is Rising series since those both have scattered moments that turn up in my head without necessarily dragging their context along. (Fine, maybe I should do this meme at some point...)
Glad to hear at least anecdotal evidence of people willing to mask in public.
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Ironically, I left a lot of collections off this list, both in the interests of space and because I forgot them until afterward, but myth and folklore comprised much of my elementary school reading.
(Fine, maybe I should do this meme at some point...)
I would love to see your list! The Oz and Cooper were both standing in for their series and my favorites of them. The DWJ was almost hopeless, so I went with one of my earliest and still beloved.
Glad to hear at least anecdotal evidence of people willing to mask in public.
I am still usually the one person in the room with a mask on, but I really appreciated my seatmate.