15 books
Transmemed from
gangrel_pri
List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you. They should be the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag however many friends you want, including *me*, because I'm interested in seeing what books you lot choose (and might try them myself if I like the title).
(Actually I'm not tagging ... just do it if you like.)
What - ONLY 15????
1. The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee. The most romantic book of all time (beats Gone With the Wind hands down) by a master of the fantasy genre.
2. Lord of the Rings trilogy. Well, I did encounter it all in one volume, so I'm not cheating. I had very young children at the time, pre-schoolers. Nevertheless, I had my nose in it every spare minute and finished it in two weeks. My then husband (he whom I call FishyHubby) kept exclaiming irritatedly, "What is it about that book?" As soon as I finished, he picked it up. It was a weekend and we happened to be lying in bed early one morning at the time. He stayed in bed all weekend and finished it in the two days!
3. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig. Read it when it first came out, and still have my treasured copy. Couldn't tell you much about what it says, though, so many years later - but will always remember loving the experience of reading it, finding in it quirky originality of stye and structure, and wise content. (Must go back and have another look one day and see if I still think so.)
4. Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Christo, The Three Musketeers, and all the Musketeers sequels. Yes I know, this IS cheating, but I can't leave any out and they'd use up too many numbers individually. And even though The Count is a different story, they are all together in my mind because I read them all during childhood (yes I was a precocious reader) and fell in love with Dumas. Had them all, was persuaded against my inclination to get rid of them during one major relocation, and have regretted it ever since. Have replaced The Count and The Three Musketeers but the rest are hard to come by now.
5. Frossia by E. M. Almedigen - and if I cheat, I'll say Dasha too, by same author. Realistic novels about Russia in the early days of Communism, by a Russian-born writer who lived through that era but was able to move to England in 1922. The leading characters are memorable, as are their experiences.
6. The little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. A children's story about a girl and a unicorn, early magical realism (though it wasn't called that, nor any such genre conceived of, until many decades later) which I read at the right age and have loved forever.
7. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. (Speaking of magical realism.) It opens with the advent of a huge dog, reminiscent of the arrival of my late lamented Flint, and remains rivetting.
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The first book actually labelled magical realism that I encountered. As un-put-down-able as Tolkien. I recognised it immediately as Great Literature, regardless of genre - whereas The House of the Spriits, which I love much more, is merely an excellent book. It took me a long way into it, though, to understand it as an allegory of the social history of the author's country (Colombia). If I ever find out who stole my copy, I'll kill them by slow torture! Actually I probably do know, but don't know where that person is any more.
9. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Required text in my second year of university, and a great discovery. I'd not met Yeats before, except for "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" much anothologised in schoolbooks, which didn't grab me much. After seeing the whole of his work, I fell in love forever and he remains my favourite poet. A friend once said that when you get lines of poetry going through your head, particularly as appropriate commentary for something that's happening, "if it isn't Shakespeare, it's always Yeats." She was right.
10. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. How could anyone not fall in love with this book and its central character? Secondarily, it has some personal romantic associations for me.
11. The Collected Poems of Michael Dransfield. My favourite Australian poet. Just beautiful! I go back to him often.
12. The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. A very different poet from Yeats or Dransfield! But up there with them, one of the truly great, masterly in her use of language.
13. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I read it on a plane, soon after the suicide of someone I was deeply in love with. I was still dealing with shock and grief - yet this book had me laughing out loud! Anything that could do that, in such circumstances, must be REALLY funny.
14. Conversations with God, Books 1-3. Well, you can’t really consider them apart from each other. They just make so much sense to me, like a breath of fresh air - and I do like a God with a sense of humour. (Even if presented through a somewhat Christian filter, so it seems to me, despite avowals of being more universal than that).
15. The Catcher in the Rye. To use a word and phrase I don’t much like, I guess it encapsulated “the Zeitgeist of the time”. But anyway, I fell in love with it like everyone of that generation who picked it up, and Holden Caulfield is frozen in time forever as the quintessence of ... er, um ... it’s kinda like the intellectual’s “Rebel Without a Cause”. (Yes yes, I know that was a movie, not a book.)
I could have gone on and on, but if I didn’t stop somewhere it’d probably run into hundreds.
I notice I speak often of "falling in love" with these books/writers/characters. Yes, exactly!
gangrel_pri
List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you. They should be the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag however many friends you want, including *me*, because I'm interested in seeing what books you lot choose (and might try them myself if I like the title).
(Actually I'm not tagging ... just do it if you like.)
What - ONLY 15????
1. The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee. The most romantic book of all time (beats Gone With the Wind hands down) by a master of the fantasy genre.
2. Lord of the Rings trilogy. Well, I did encounter it all in one volume, so I'm not cheating. I had very young children at the time, pre-schoolers. Nevertheless, I had my nose in it every spare minute and finished it in two weeks. My then husband (he whom I call FishyHubby) kept exclaiming irritatedly, "What is it about that book?" As soon as I finished, he picked it up. It was a weekend and we happened to be lying in bed early one morning at the time. He stayed in bed all weekend and finished it in the two days!
3. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig. Read it when it first came out, and still have my treasured copy. Couldn't tell you much about what it says, though, so many years later - but will always remember loving the experience of reading it, finding in it quirky originality of stye and structure, and wise content. (Must go back and have another look one day and see if I still think so.)
4. Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Christo, The Three Musketeers, and all the Musketeers sequels. Yes I know, this IS cheating, but I can't leave any out and they'd use up too many numbers individually. And even though The Count is a different story, they are all together in my mind because I read them all during childhood (yes I was a precocious reader) and fell in love with Dumas. Had them all, was persuaded against my inclination to get rid of them during one major relocation, and have regretted it ever since. Have replaced The Count and The Three Musketeers but the rest are hard to come by now.
5. Frossia by E. M. Almedigen - and if I cheat, I'll say Dasha too, by same author. Realistic novels about Russia in the early days of Communism, by a Russian-born writer who lived through that era but was able to move to England in 1922. The leading characters are memorable, as are their experiences.
6. The little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. A children's story about a girl and a unicorn, early magical realism (though it wasn't called that, nor any such genre conceived of, until many decades later) which I read at the right age and have loved forever.
7. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. (Speaking of magical realism.) It opens with the advent of a huge dog, reminiscent of the arrival of my late lamented Flint, and remains rivetting.
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The first book actually labelled magical realism that I encountered. As un-put-down-able as Tolkien. I recognised it immediately as Great Literature, regardless of genre - whereas The House of the Spriits, which I love much more, is merely an excellent book. It took me a long way into it, though, to understand it as an allegory of the social history of the author's country (Colombia). If I ever find out who stole my copy, I'll kill them by slow torture! Actually I probably do know, but don't know where that person is any more.
9. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Required text in my second year of university, and a great discovery. I'd not met Yeats before, except for "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" much anothologised in schoolbooks, which didn't grab me much. After seeing the whole of his work, I fell in love forever and he remains my favourite poet. A friend once said that when you get lines of poetry going through your head, particularly as appropriate commentary for something that's happening, "if it isn't Shakespeare, it's always Yeats." She was right.
10. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. How could anyone not fall in love with this book and its central character? Secondarily, it has some personal romantic associations for me.
11. The Collected Poems of Michael Dransfield. My favourite Australian poet. Just beautiful! I go back to him often.
12. The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. A very different poet from Yeats or Dransfield! But up there with them, one of the truly great, masterly in her use of language.
13. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I read it on a plane, soon after the suicide of someone I was deeply in love with. I was still dealing with shock and grief - yet this book had me laughing out loud! Anything that could do that, in such circumstances, must be REALLY funny.
14. Conversations with God, Books 1-3. Well, you can’t really consider them apart from each other. They just make so much sense to me, like a breath of fresh air - and I do like a God with a sense of humour. (Even if presented through a somewhat Christian filter, so it seems to me, despite avowals of being more universal than that).
15. The Catcher in the Rye. To use a word and phrase I don’t much like, I guess it encapsulated “the Zeitgeist of the time”. But anyway, I fell in love with it like everyone of that generation who picked it up, and Holden Caulfield is frozen in time forever as the quintessence of ... er, um ... it’s kinda like the intellectual’s “Rebel Without a Cause”. (Yes yes, I know that was a movie, not a book.)
I could have gone on and on, but if I didn’t stop somewhere it’d probably run into hundreds.
I notice I speak often of "falling in love" with these books/writers/characters. Yes, exactly!