A while back, truepenny and Mirrorthaw and I were talking about books over dinner (...yeah, there's a surprise) and Mirrorthaw brought up the notion of one's own Ten Most Important Books. Not favorite books, or best books, but the most important. Truepenny pointed out that such a list requires not only picking the most important books but deciding what " ( Read more... )

I got freelance pay on Friday. A good chunk of that has to go to paying off the car's new alternator, the demise of the previous one having left me stranded overnight in Dundee, Illinois a few weeks ago, but there was enough left that I could in good conscience go on a serious book-acquisition excursion with truepennySo we went downtown and had lunch at a ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago I cleaned up my Books To Get list and found, to my delight, that I'd actually made a dent in it. It was still a long list (six pages, single-spaced, 10pt Times New Roman), but several focused trips to bookstores and some judicious borrowing from truepenny had allowed me to cross off quite a lot.

Yesterday stakebait posted a request for urban fantasy ( Read more... )

A couple of months ago, truepenny lent me Nancy Springer's Larque on the Wing. I'd spent the holidays with my parents; my mom, who gets points for good intentions but perpetually low scores in execution, gave me a couple of xmas presents that prompted renenet to remark, "I think I've figured it out. Your mother lives in a parallel dimension and has never actually ( Read more... )

...though not in that order.

( cut for self-involvement )

Today I went downtown with $30.00, intending to buy wool socks. Instead I ended up with four books of poetry.

It occurs to me that this is sort of the story of my life in miniature.

Here's my proposal for a canon of the twentieth-century novel in English. Like all proposals of canon, it's subject to debate. I've limited it to 100 novels, partly as a counterpoint to the Modern Library's list and partly because 100 is a nice round number that's usefully large.

( disclaimers and explanations )

I can't believe how fucked-up this list is. No, wait. That's not true. I can easily believe how fucked-up this list is. Let me start again.

I am terribly disappointed at how fucked-up this list is.

( the list )

So today I was at the corner thrift store, which I love and fear in approximately equal measure, and I spotted bookshelves. Just like the bookshelves I'm trying to find extra shelves for, though in a different color. And the color? Really, who cares? I mean, I'm not so bourgeois that I couldn't live with different-color shelves in a bookcase ( Read more... )

It's all melymbrosia's fault that I was superimposing Faith & Buffy on Francesca Lia Block's Violet & Claire even before I started reading. But even if I'd gone into the book with no such predisposition, there's a passage that would still have made me think of "Bad Girls":There is nothing so good almost as dancing with a great girl dancer. It seems so much ( Read more... )