Favorite books, continued:
30) The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien. It's not an easy read; it's not an easy journey; as Tolkien himself says, quietly, is the story of beauty slowly marred and destroyed. And worth the read, every time.
29) The Book of Heroic Failures, Stephen Pile. This is a book that celebrates people that are not very good at doing things - assassinating Castro, lighting coal fires, writing poetry, solving crosswords, fighting wars, writing Portuguese to English dictionaries (the title of this exciting work was English as She Is Spoke, and so on.
28) The Changeling Sea, Patricia A. McKillip. A short, quiet little fairy tale about the sea, two princes bound to it, a girl, and a magician.
27) Nine Coaches Waiting Mary Stewart. Before turning to Arthur and Merlin, Stewart wrote rich romantic half Gothic novels that sometimes varied in quality - I never warmed to The Ivy Tree or My Brother Michael, but when she was on, as here, few could match her for satisfying. Runner-up: Touch Not the Cat, where Stewart played with the idea of mental telepathy; it's another deeply satisfying romance.
26) The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson.
25) The Grand Sophy, Georgette Heyer. Any book that contains a single scene featuring a mustard foot bath, a Spanish marquesa, a terrible poet, chickens and a gun - in highly mannered Regency England - is a book that I really can't summarize, but I will reread. Frequently.
24) Death in the Andamans, M.M. Kaye. Before writing The Far Pavilions, M.M. Kaye wrote a series of mysteries where British subjects sit around watching the slow demise of their British Empire while happily bumping each other off. This one and Death in Zanzibar were two of my favorites of the group.
23) Richard Halliburton's Book of Marvels. My father gave me this book when I was nine, and I poured over it for years, and years, and years, and even now, I can still shut my eyes and see every word, every picture, on the page.
Halliburton himself was a very, but very, strange dude, a journalist who knocked about the world in search of very, but very, strange adventures. This book grew partly from those travels: in the book Halliburton envisions taking a group of children with him to see the world's greatest Marvels: the Great Wall of China; Victoria Falls; the Pyramids; and so on, telling the various stories of what happened to him along the way. (His saga of reaching Tibet in pre-China takeover days, and meeting with one of the living gods, is breathtaking.)
The book caught me and held me: I determined that some day I would take a trip myself, around the world, following the marvels, adding a few of my own and deleting a few (I don't really need to go to the Blue Grotto and throw up again, but so need to see the sculptures at Xi'an). I still plan this. Someday.
22) Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Amanda Foreman. A compulsive gambler trapped in a ménage a trios; no wonder this book can't be put down. She suffered. She cried. She invented extraordinary hairstyles. She fell in love with a man most distinctly not her rather chilly husband. And most of all, she lived.
21) Emily of New Moon and sequels, L.M. Montgomery. I knew I wanted to be a writer long before I read these; these books convinced me that I could be one.
Runner up: Anne of Green Gables and sequels (except for Anne of Ingleside, which is just not a good book.)