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.
no subject
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!
no subject
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.