Mm, quotes are actually hard! I'm a really visual reader - mostly I remember books as images more than, or at least as much as, the words; I remember the words to poetry and plays and music much better. That said, the end of Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo, her novel about a Greek actor who is a contemporary of Plato, breaks my heart every time:
"I thought how, before I went on at Pella, I had touched the mask for luck, and it seemed the god had said to me, 'Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone's soul is listerning.' Someone's always is, I suppose, if one only knew…
All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? … No one will ever make a tragedy - and that is as well, for one could not bear it - whose grief is that the principals never met."
The first part is what every artist dreams of, I think. The second is the cold reminder of the limits of mortality.
All right, this is a random three - three books I re-read on a regular basis (and Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo would be on the list, except I just talked about it above):
James Tiptree, Jr., Brightness Falls From the Air, possibly the most devastating meditation on memory and guilt that I've ever read, and a nail-biting adventure, too.
Katharine Kerr, Polar City Blues, an apparently straightforward sci-fi thriller about a retired Navy woman, her telepathic baseball-player boyfriend, and what may be an alien invasion, that also manages to talk about poverty, class, and politics in some very profound ways.
Lothar-Günther Buchheim, The Boat - you've probably seen the movie, but if not, it's a novel based on the author's experience as a war correspondent on U96. I read it when it first came out, when I was 13 and no real context to understand it; I've re-read it many times since, and it's an extraordinary story of a particularly surreal sort of war.
Ask me the same question tomorrow, and you'd get three totally different books!
For the longest time it was the book I took on airplanes and traveling because I could stand to read it twice in quick succession and I always ran out of things to read... Thank goodness for ebooks!
Oh, that's really hard! I'm an enthusiast by nature - I fall hard and fannishly for lots of things, so this could be a really long list, even just restricting it to books. If I had to pick just one
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I've not done the fandom thing about Sherlock - although I've always loved the original books, and I adore the new Sherlock series too - so I've not heard of the Baker Street Irregulars as a fannish society, but I hope it didn't take them long to include women - grrrr!
The BSI were founded in the early 30s, so I'll cut them a little slack. A very little. ;-) (Also, I really was a kid.) They admit women now, just as the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes admit men, but they're very, very geeky. Even by my standards!
Ebooks or physical books? How about ebooks and physical books? In practical terms, I will always buy a physical book when I know I'm going to need to flip back and forth a lot - reference books, gaming manuals, dictionaries, things like that. I also want physical books for picture-heavy references. On the other hand, my iPad carries an enormous library and, with a recurring vision problem, the adjustable font size has been a godsend.
Lately, I'm more likely to pick up a new author in ebook first, especially if their books are priced competitively with mass market paper. That doesn't mean that I won't buy an interesting paperback by someone I've never read before, but I do think harder about paying $8.99 or $9.99 than I do about paying $3.99.
Important moments of my reading life... Wow, it feels like there are a lot of them! Getting my adult library card - I'd say getting a library card, but I don't remember that one. (My folks got each of us our own library card pretty much as soon as we could be trusted not to destroy the books, because you could only have 7 books on each card, and we were all avid readers.) I was only 12 and had to have special permission from my parents, but my father was so happy that I could get my own books and not have to put them on his card that he even said he'd pay any overdue fines
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Comments 17
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"I thought how, before I went on at Pella, I had touched the mask for luck, and it seemed the god had said to me, 'Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone's soul is listerning.' Someone's always is, I suppose, if one only knew…
All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? … No one will ever make a tragedy - and that is as well, for one could not bear it - whose grief is that the principals never met."
The first part is what every artist dreams of, I think. The second is the cold reminder of the limits of mortality.
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James Tiptree, Jr., Brightness Falls From the Air, possibly the most devastating meditation on memory and guilt that I've ever read, and a nail-biting adventure, too.
Katharine Kerr, Polar City Blues, an apparently straightforward sci-fi thriller about a retired Navy woman, her telepathic baseball-player boyfriend, and what may be an alien invasion, that also manages to talk about poverty, class, and politics in some very profound ways.
Lothar-Günther Buchheim, The Boat - you've probably seen the movie, but if not, it's a novel based on the author's experience as a war correspondent on U96. I read it when it first came out, when I was 13 and no real context to understand it; I've re-read it many times since, and it's an extraordinary story of a particularly surreal sort of war.
Ask me the same question tomorrow, and you'd get three totally different books!
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I've not done the fandom thing about Sherlock - although I've always loved the original books, and I adore the new Sherlock series too - so I've not heard of the Baker Street Irregulars as a fannish society, but I hope it didn't take them long to include women - grrrr!
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Lately, I'm more likely to pick up a new author in ebook first, especially if their books are priced competitively with mass market paper. That doesn't mean that I won't buy an interesting paperback by someone I've never read before, but I do think harder about paying $8.99 or $9.99 than I do about paying $3.99.
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