Does it feel better in that cold Boston weather?

[sovay]

WHRB was on fire when 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.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

Only 12/100, although I had a number of near-misses - I've read a different book(s) by the same author - and now have a longer to-read list than I started with.

[sorcyress]

My mom loves the Perilous Gard, and I read it too late for it to be formative but thought it was a lot of fun.

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

[cyphomandra]

Devil on my Back! Gosh I loved that and reread it over and over, and then I completely forgot it for this meme (also forgotten - Virginia Hamilton’s Dustland and HM Hoover’s This Time of Darkness). 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.

[landingtree]

It wasn’t quite formative for me, but Merlin’s Mistake was one of my father’s childhood books and I certainly read it and liked it. 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.

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!

[osprey_archer]

I got 24! I know I read Cruising the Movies because you recommended it, and that book was an Experience.

As was The Winter Prince. Can a book be formative even if you read it in your thirties? It was definitely SOMETHING.

[minoanmiss]

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.

[thomasyan]

9. I couldn't remember the titles of the Menolly Pern books except for Dragondrums, so every time another Pern book shows up on one of these lists, I have to double-check to see.

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?

[selkie]

I counted Verse. Is cheating? (I am honored that it got stuck in your head.)

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.

[ethelmay]

Got 41. Some I don't remember but know I read. A few more I tried to read and couldn't get into.

[regshoe]

I admire everyone who can keep this list to just one book per author! Apparently the range of authors who've been very important to me is not that wide, if the range of books is.

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

[thisbluespirit]

I'm afraid I reversed your scores for my list, which means rather than a perfect match for each other, you're just terribly wide-read! XD

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!

[theseatheseatheopensea]

Maybe I should make another list.

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!

[yhlee]

I'm surprised I did as well as 30/100! Like, it's weirdly embarrassing I've never read I, Claudius (the Robert Graves I hunted for and found was The White Goddess, so help me) or Mary Stewart anything, etc.

[nineweaving]

I've read 33/100. Not bad. We definitely Venn.

Nine

[gwynnega]

Soon after I saw your list, with I, Claudius on it, I happened to hear this song by my friend Cindy Lee Berryhill: "Emperor: Little Boots." Do you know it?

[thedarlingone]

15/100. I am now realizing I forgot to put any Sayers or Chesterton or Norton on mine, and there's something flickering at the edges of my brain, another author I associate with Chesterton somehow and have also forgotten. There are so many books in the world.

[asakiyume]

It gives me such joy to look through these lists. I smile at these old friends, and then also at the ones who I don't know personally but whom I know through your (and other people's) talking about them. One day! One day.

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...

[skygiants]

38 on this one! I thought so hard about whether to do Gammage Cup or Firelings and it still remains a tough call. I had Mythago Wood on my shelf all through growing up and somehow never got around to actually reading it; someday.

[ashlyme]

16/100. There's a lot to investigate here!

[rushthatspeaks]

44/100, which seems about right, given our slightly different genre inclinations.

[asakiyume]

Reporting back on "Harvard"--fun tune, and entrancing video! (Though the narrative I constructed to go along with it is a little confused.)

...

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.

[thanate]

23 or so, but your list is also making me realize the number of formative books I have never actually read (mostly folklore collections that influenced what was common in the storytelling community when I was growing up) or actively dislike(d).

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.