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
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!
no subject
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.)
no subject
Well, Elizabeth Goudge & Madeleine L'Engle, as we were talking about elsewhere, for one. Peter Pan - I can never remember which one(s)/editions I've actually read, Vivian Alcock (I wanted to read the Cassie Palmer but I never found it); I can't remember the ones I actually did read, but there were a couple. Mary Norton, Anne McCaffrey (I did read about 2 of the Pern ones but don't ask me which. BUt I did love The Ship Who... series.) Robin McKinley, although mainly only Beauty - she was always one of those authors I felt I ought to get along with amazingly but never quite have. Dickens, Tanith Lee, again only read 1 or 2 and not that one. Geraldine McCaughrean - I read, or wanted to read something of hers growing up, but I forget. However, I read several for work as a children's librarian, and loved The White Darkness - I got a copy signed by her at our book festival and told her so, and she was very pleased, because at the time that was apparently her favourite as well. (I don't have it any more, though; I might have bought it for a library prize) & Kite Rider, Stop the Train & Peter Pan in Scarlet. Le Guin, I have read the Earthsea books and The Left Hand of Darkness. I've read The Franchise Affair & Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, which put me off, although I understand now that I just read the wrong ones. I read a lot of Allingham's Campion, but I specifically remember not reading The China Governess. I had a copy of it when I was getting ill, before I knew what was going on and I just couldn't and gave it away in time, as happened with an awful lot of others round then, because it was awful just not being ever up to managing to read them. I've read 3 Barbara Hamblys recently (my first), but again, not that one.
My actual favorite by Robert Holdstock is Lavondyss (1988),
I definitely read that, too! I can't remember what I felt about it. I think I liked it. When I read Mythago Wood, I was still in the stage where I'd just borrow the same books out of the library over and over if I liked them, but by the time I read the later one, I had grown up a bit and was not reading enough to keep rereading so much, which is to say I can remember my fascination with the first and absolutely nothing at all of the other, except that I know I read it! There was another one, wasn't there? (I just went to look, and apparently several, and I definitely didn't read all of them. But the one I was thinking of was The Bone Forest..)
it's the one that blew the top of my head off.
It is definitely one where you need a bigger head to fit it in! I just tried to make mine expand slowly over repeated readings. XD
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.
Fair, although - I would be curious to click if you did. :-)