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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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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I fell in love with Warner's voice a few years earlier when I read "A Spirit Rises" in her collection by that name.
Nine
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I got it from Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold's Elsewhere Vol. III (1984), which came from the same section of Upper Story Books as my 1977 Del Rey Ballantine paperback of Lud-in-the-Mist with the egregious cover. I would read individual stories out of it until I finally gave up and bought the anthology. It introduced me to Angela Carter with "The Lady of the House of Love" and Naomi Mitchison with an excerpt from To the Chapel Perilous, too.
I fell in love with Warner's voice a few years earlier when I read "A Spirit Rises" in her collection by that name.
I love your illustration for that one.
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That is one great selection of stories. I can see why you caved.
I love your illustration for that one.
Thank you. That really is a foundational story for me. I even copied out a passage in my commonplace book.
Nine
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Plus a poem by Leonard Cohen that I had only heard Buffy Sainte-Marie sing.
Thank you. That really is a foundational story for me. I even copied out a passage in my commonplace book.
Which one?
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Good heavens! The whole rocking horse scene.
I would love to show you that commonplace book. It's so quintessentially Nine.