25 Things #5: 15 books
I've been tagged in another meme, when I still haven't finished up the last one. To kill two birds with one stone, I'm calling this one of the 25 Things. This one is:
"This can be a quick one. Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends choose."
Never one to play by the rules, I refuse to tag anyone. Also, I don't see any point in a list that doesn't include at least a brief description of why you liked a book.
1. A Wrinkle In Time
1. The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe
I do not honestly remember which of these was my "introduction to fantasy", as I'd read both of them at a very young age. I particularly remember being enthralled by the idea of folding space in A Wrinkle In Time. I read the first three books in L'Engle's series, but got bored with the fourth and stopped. I read all seven of the Narnia series. Narnia is still on my bookshelf to this day, in a nice hardcover set that was a gift from Brian (minus one of the books, which Brian swears up and down was in the box when he gave it to us, but wasn't.)
3. Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
4. Restaurant At The End Of The Universe
5. Life, The Universe, And Everything
6. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish
When I was 12, my best friend Sue and I were in our school library, musing over books. She picked up HHGTTG and said "This is the *best* book, you *have* to read it." While I love the entire series, my absolute favorite part is still a throwaway line in the setup of the first book: "And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..."
You may note that Lewis and L'Engle only get one entry on the list for their entire series, while Adams gets four. That's because, while I enjoyed all of the series, I could not immediately name the titles of other books from Lewis or L'Engle without looking them up, and if you named a particular scene out of the Lewis or L'Engle series, I'm not entirely certain that I could tell you which book it came from. Not so with HHGTTG. Also, I'm aware that Adams wrote a fifth book in this series. He shouldn't have.
Hitchhiker's Guide is the book I loan out to people most often. It's also the book I get back least often. I've taken to just buying a new copy immediately upon loaning it out.
7. I Want To Go Home
This is the first book I ever read that I actually had to put down because I was laughing too hard to continue reading. It's geared towards pre-teens, and I'm sad to say that re-reads as an adult have not elicited the same fits of giggles that I used to have as a kid reading it.
Korman has several other books, including an entire series about a boarding school, and they're all pretty funny, but this book was the best of the bunch.
I still someday want to hold a scavenger hunt like the one in this book, and see what people come up with.
8. The Family Nobody Wanted
The true story of a minister and his wife who adopted twelve children, most of whom were considered unadoptable. I first read this when I was about ten, and for the longest time afterward I dreamed of a large family of adopted children.
9. Castle Perilous
Have you ever read a book, or a series, and then when you'd finished with everything the author wrote, you made up more in your head? This is that series for me.
The series itself is only okay. It's light fantasy, in a world with gates to thousands of other worlds. It suffers from being able to do anything it wants, so oftentimes it feels like the characters are tumbleweeds rolling around in a world too big for them. But something about the dynamics of the ruling family lit up ideas in my head, and I was off and running.
10. Elf Defense
I was standing in the library's sci-fi/fantasy section one day, picking up books, reading the back cover, and putting them back on shelf, unable to find something that sparked my interest. Another woman came over, picked out a couple of books for herself, and then handed me Elf Defense and said "have you read this one?" When I said no, she said "Try it. It's one of my favorites."
Now it's one of mine, too. Friesner is my absolute favorite author, and I wish she'd stop editing short story anthologies and go back to writing novels. Even though most of them are geared toward teenagers (Harlot's Ruse being a big exception), I still love her work. Except the Star Trek novels.
11. Pyramids
By rights, Pratchett ought to have a lot more slots in this list; I gave Adams four, and Pratchett is right up there with him. But honestly, by the time I got this far into the list, I was tired of picking out which books should qualify out of any given series.
Pyramids made the list because it was how I finally got into Discworld. Years before I read this book (which is #5 or 6 in the series), Steve had raved about The Colour of Magic, and on his recommendation I had picked up the first three books in the series from the library... and HATED them. There was too much going on, too many characters, too many aspects of the world, too many annoying characteristics of the main character. I couldn't wrap my head around it, and I strongly suspected that the author couldn't either. (In Once More With Footnotes, Pratchett admits that he doesn't like the main character of the first two books very much either, and that his only purpose in life is to run into other people who are much more interesting than he is.) When I bitched about the books to Jim, he said "Oh, no, don't start with the first book. Here, try this one" and handed me Pyramids. It's slow, by Discworld standards, but it takes place in a small corner of the world and is heavily based on Egyptian themes-- which meant that Pratchett didn't have to take three chapters to explain the culture. Once I got the hang of that small corner of the world, it was easier to expand outward, and I did eventually make it back to the first couple of books, which made more sense by then.
12. The Bromeliad series (Truckers, Diggers, Wings)
Well, I did say Pratchett ought to have more than one slot. I chose a different series, in part because it irks me that no one realizes he wrote more than just Discworld, and in part because it's a really good series.
The series is about small creatures who are forced to move out of their home when a department store closes and their resources dry up. I remember very little about the details of what they do, because the part of the story that stuck with me was how their society threatened to splinter when change was forced upon them (some resisted change so strongly that they would prefer to stay and starve), and how the challenges of rebuilding sparked new advancements. But what I remember most strongly about the books is the frog. The series is named for a flower, in which tiny frogs live their entire lives, and are used as a metaphor throughout the books. One of the frogs starts to wonder what's outside the flower, a concept that is so foreign to other frogs that they can't comprehend the concept of "outside", much less something in "outside". At the very end, the frog finally makes it to the edge of his flower, and looks out into the vast "outside"... which is a sea of other flowers, each of which has a colony of tiny frogs in it.
13. On A Pale Horse
14. For Love Of Evil
If you've encountered Anthony via his Xanth series, you may be inclined to run screaming from any of his work (though I would point out that the first half-dozen or so of Xanth aren't all that bad, and then Man From Mundania was good. It's just the other 20 or 30 books in the series that are terrible.) This series is easily his best work. The first book will make you look at the Grim Reaper in a whole new light. The sixth will make you look at the Devil in a whole new light. The central idea that certain mythological personas are actually titles of office that get passed from person to person was an eye-opener for me (these were high-school reads for me the first time through). Don't read them in order, though-- the second book is about Time, and is highly confusing. It makes much more sense to skip over Time and come back to it after you've read the fifth book. Knowing who all the other people in the series are helps tremendously in figuring out what the heck is going on in Bearing An Hourglass.
15. Organizing From The Inside Out
The only non-fiction book to make the list. I'm a natural-born clutterbug, with a desire to live in a clean and organized house. This has prompted me to read all manner of organizational books, and I can assure that most of them suck. This one skips over most (though not all) of the So F'ing Obvious It's Ridiculous Bits (Get rid of stuff you don't use! Put everything away in the same place every time! No, really?) in favor of a kindergarten philosophy-- namely, that kindergartens work, and work well, because they keep things together that get used together. Most of the book is about stepping back and figuring out how you really use items, and then creating work and storage spaces centered around activities. It's surprisingly effective.
"This can be a quick one. Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends choose."
Never one to play by the rules, I refuse to tag anyone. Also, I don't see any point in a list that doesn't include at least a brief description of why you liked a book.
1. A Wrinkle In Time
1. The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe
I do not honestly remember which of these was my "introduction to fantasy", as I'd read both of them at a very young age. I particularly remember being enthralled by the idea of folding space in A Wrinkle In Time. I read the first three books in L'Engle's series, but got bored with the fourth and stopped. I read all seven of the Narnia series. Narnia is still on my bookshelf to this day, in a nice hardcover set that was a gift from Brian (minus one of the books, which Brian swears up and down was in the box when he gave it to us, but wasn't.)
3. Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
4. Restaurant At The End Of The Universe
5. Life, The Universe, And Everything
6. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish
When I was 12, my best friend Sue and I were in our school library, musing over books. She picked up HHGTTG and said "This is the *best* book, you *have* to read it." While I love the entire series, my absolute favorite part is still a throwaway line in the setup of the first book: "And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..."
You may note that Lewis and L'Engle only get one entry on the list for their entire series, while Adams gets four. That's because, while I enjoyed all of the series, I could not immediately name the titles of other books from Lewis or L'Engle without looking them up, and if you named a particular scene out of the Lewis or L'Engle series, I'm not entirely certain that I could tell you which book it came from. Not so with HHGTTG. Also, I'm aware that Adams wrote a fifth book in this series. He shouldn't have.
Hitchhiker's Guide is the book I loan out to people most often. It's also the book I get back least often. I've taken to just buying a new copy immediately upon loaning it out.
7. I Want To Go Home
This is the first book I ever read that I actually had to put down because I was laughing too hard to continue reading. It's geared towards pre-teens, and I'm sad to say that re-reads as an adult have not elicited the same fits of giggles that I used to have as a kid reading it.
Korman has several other books, including an entire series about a boarding school, and they're all pretty funny, but this book was the best of the bunch.
I still someday want to hold a scavenger hunt like the one in this book, and see what people come up with.
8. The Family Nobody Wanted
The true story of a minister and his wife who adopted twelve children, most of whom were considered unadoptable. I first read this when I was about ten, and for the longest time afterward I dreamed of a large family of adopted children.
9. Castle Perilous
Have you ever read a book, or a series, and then when you'd finished with everything the author wrote, you made up more in your head? This is that series for me.
The series itself is only okay. It's light fantasy, in a world with gates to thousands of other worlds. It suffers from being able to do anything it wants, so oftentimes it feels like the characters are tumbleweeds rolling around in a world too big for them. But something about the dynamics of the ruling family lit up ideas in my head, and I was off and running.
10. Elf Defense
I was standing in the library's sci-fi/fantasy section one day, picking up books, reading the back cover, and putting them back on shelf, unable to find something that sparked my interest. Another woman came over, picked out a couple of books for herself, and then handed me Elf Defense and said "have you read this one?" When I said no, she said "Try it. It's one of my favorites."
Now it's one of mine, too. Friesner is my absolute favorite author, and I wish she'd stop editing short story anthologies and go back to writing novels. Even though most of them are geared toward teenagers (Harlot's Ruse being a big exception), I still love her work. Except the Star Trek novels.
11. Pyramids
By rights, Pratchett ought to have a lot more slots in this list; I gave Adams four, and Pratchett is right up there with him. But honestly, by the time I got this far into the list, I was tired of picking out which books should qualify out of any given series.
Pyramids made the list because it was how I finally got into Discworld. Years before I read this book (which is #5 or 6 in the series), Steve had raved about The Colour of Magic, and on his recommendation I had picked up the first three books in the series from the library... and HATED them. There was too much going on, too many characters, too many aspects of the world, too many annoying characteristics of the main character. I couldn't wrap my head around it, and I strongly suspected that the author couldn't either. (In Once More With Footnotes, Pratchett admits that he doesn't like the main character of the first two books very much either, and that his only purpose in life is to run into other people who are much more interesting than he is.) When I bitched about the books to Jim, he said "Oh, no, don't start with the first book. Here, try this one" and handed me Pyramids. It's slow, by Discworld standards, but it takes place in a small corner of the world and is heavily based on Egyptian themes-- which meant that Pratchett didn't have to take three chapters to explain the culture. Once I got the hang of that small corner of the world, it was easier to expand outward, and I did eventually make it back to the first couple of books, which made more sense by then.
12. The Bromeliad series (Truckers, Diggers, Wings)
Well, I did say Pratchett ought to have more than one slot. I chose a different series, in part because it irks me that no one realizes he wrote more than just Discworld, and in part because it's a really good series.
The series is about small creatures who are forced to move out of their home when a department store closes and their resources dry up. I remember very little about the details of what they do, because the part of the story that stuck with me was how their society threatened to splinter when change was forced upon them (some resisted change so strongly that they would prefer to stay and starve), and how the challenges of rebuilding sparked new advancements. But what I remember most strongly about the books is the frog. The series is named for a flower, in which tiny frogs live their entire lives, and are used as a metaphor throughout the books. One of the frogs starts to wonder what's outside the flower, a concept that is so foreign to other frogs that they can't comprehend the concept of "outside", much less something in "outside". At the very end, the frog finally makes it to the edge of his flower, and looks out into the vast "outside"... which is a sea of other flowers, each of which has a colony of tiny frogs in it.
13. On A Pale Horse
14. For Love Of Evil
If you've encountered Anthony via his Xanth series, you may be inclined to run screaming from any of his work (though I would point out that the first half-dozen or so of Xanth aren't all that bad, and then Man From Mundania was good. It's just the other 20 or 30 books in the series that are terrible.) This series is easily his best work. The first book will make you look at the Grim Reaper in a whole new light. The sixth will make you look at the Devil in a whole new light. The central idea that certain mythological personas are actually titles of office that get passed from person to person was an eye-opener for me (these were high-school reads for me the first time through). Don't read them in order, though-- the second book is about Time, and is highly confusing. It makes much more sense to skip over Time and come back to it after you've read the fifth book. Knowing who all the other people in the series are helps tremendously in figuring out what the heck is going on in Bearing An Hourglass.
15. Organizing From The Inside Out
The only non-fiction book to make the list. I'm a natural-born clutterbug, with a desire to live in a clean and organized house. This has prompted me to read all manner of organizational books, and I can assure that most of them suck. This one skips over most (though not all) of the So F'ing Obvious It's Ridiculous Bits (Get rid of stuff you don't use! Put everything away in the same place every time! No, really?) in favor of a kindergarten philosophy-- namely, that kindergartens work, and work well, because they keep things together that get used together. Most of the book is about stepping back and figuring out how you really use items, and then creating work and storage spaces centered around activities. It's surprisingly effective.