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 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?
no subject
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.
no subject
no subject
Sleipnir is a kitty!