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List ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don't take but a few minutes, and don't think too hard --- they don't have to be the "right" or "great" works, just the ones that have touched you.
My Ten Books:
These are the first ten books that came to mind. They're mostly books from my childhood, and most of them were determined by the selection at my local library. I joined when I was seven, and I've been a more-or-less continuous member ever since. There are a couple of adult or later picks in there too, though. Some of those came from my parents' or relatives' personal libraries, from the public library in my college town (first thing I do when moving somewhere for any length of time is join the nearest library - I've cards for my hometown, my mother's hometown, and my college town so far), or from second-hand bookshops. Because apparently the books that stick with me tend to be random finds got on the cheap or for free -_-; Though I suppose that makes sense when you're a kid. How else are you going to get a hold of stuff? No way either me or my parents would have had the budget for the sheer volume of stuff I read. The house has thousands of books as it stands, from five separate people collecting shit as they go, and we only get to buy a fraction of what we read. Though I suppose e-books and kindles are going to be making that a mite easier now ...
My Ten Books:
These are the first ten books that came to mind. They're mostly books from my childhood, and most of them were determined by the selection at my local library. I joined when I was seven, and I've been a more-or-less continuous member ever since. There are a couple of adult or later picks in there too, though. Some of those came from my parents' or relatives' personal libraries, from the public library in my college town (first thing I do when moving somewhere for any length of time is join the nearest library - I've cards for my hometown, my mother's hometown, and my college town so far), or from second-hand bookshops. Because apparently the books that stick with me tend to be random finds got on the cheap or for free -_-; Though I suppose that makes sense when you're a kid. How else are you going to get a hold of stuff? No way either me or my parents would have had the budget for the sheer volume of stuff I read. The house has thousands of books as it stands, from five separate people collecting shit as they go, and we only get to buy a fraction of what we read. Though I suppose e-books and kindles are going to be making that a mite easier now ...
Anyway! Ten books ahead:
1) The River Boy by Tim Bowler
Local library. This is one of the earliest books I remember reading there. Well, the actual first book I ever got out of the library was called 'The Tribe With No Feet', which, when I look it up, was written by Vivienne Rae Ellis. There was another one with it, but I was so overwhelmed by my first time in the library that when Dad said 'pick out two books' I just sort of ran at the shelves and picked the first two that looked cool. I only remember that one, possibly because it had that name. But River Boy wasn't long after them, a bit after I'd actually gotten the hang of browsing and stopped being intimidated/overwhelmed by all the choices -_-;
I mostly remember it because it was ... very clean? Cool, calm. It's a story about a girl trying to deal with the fact that her grandfather is dying, and who starts seeing the subject of his last painting in real life: the mysterious river boy, who wants her to swim with him from the source of the local river to the sea forty miles away. Eventually she realises who he is and what his connection to her grandfather is. I think the book stuck with me because it's a very gentle book, a quiet sort of catharsis. I loved it very much, and felt very at peace after reading it.
2) Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
Friend of the family's library. Well, technically not this book, this one I bought for myself, but my first introduction to Discworld in general was a battered copy of Guards Guards from one of my Dad's friends. It took me a while to get the swing of it, but by the time I was thirteen or so I think I was madly in love with the series, and the rest is history.
I'm picking Feet of Clay almost entirely because I feel that WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN is probably the best sentence that Pratchett has ever written. I love some of the other books more, Night Watch in particular, but I think that sentiment is basically the ethos of Discworld for me.
3) Strange Hiding Place by Graham Marks
Local library. This is one of the two books I still regularly get out of the kids section of the library, despite being now almost 26 years old, because sometimes I just want my crummy kids science-fiction, okay? It's about a kid who finds out that his DNA is part of the blueprint of an alien weapon hidden on Earth years ago, and now that the interplanetary war is hotting up, both the aliens that made it and their enemies want it back. The retrieval goes wrong, and poor 11 year old Dez is stuck with one alien protector named Yakob while they try to get the rest of the plans before the enemy does. The scene I remember most is from the first book, where Dez and Yakob are camping out one night in the French countryside, on the run from enemy ships, and Dez scares the pants off Yakob by pulling the flashlight-under-the-chin trick when they hear some wildlife rustling in the bushes. Yakob flips out a little bit and reminds Dez that while he is the cool, armed alien from another planet who knows what he's doing, he's also alone and without back-up on an alien world trying to keep himself and a kid alive against who knows how many enemies, and that means he's under some stress, okay? I think it really struck kid!me, the idea that the adults in the situation can get scared too, and be afraid they're going to let people down and get people hurt because they aren't good enough. It made me feel like the kid could help be the brave one.
So, yeah. I keep coming back to this one, almost twenty years later, though by this stage I'm more the Yakob than the Dez -_-;
4) The Snow Walker Trilogy by Catherine Fisher
Local library. This is the other series I regularly still get out of the kids section, or would do if they hadn't moved it up to the stacks owing to it being almost falling apart. It also might have something to do with my Norse Myth obsession, since it's sort of set in a fantasy Scandinavia. It's about a girl named Jessa and her friend Thorkin, who's parents were part of a rebellion against the evil sorceress who rules their kingdom, and as punishment they're banished north to the abandoned keep where the sorceress keeps her worst monster. Who is not, naturally, at all what they've been led to believe. There are then rebellions and sieges and quests north into the deadly land of the Snow Walkers itself, with darkness and betrayals and magic and surprising heroes.
I think it stuck so hard because it was one of the first times I'd come across the 'monster who isn't as monstrous as those who've treated him as one' concept, but it isn't at all romanticised, and it's a really cool and snow-bound adventure as well. I also just really like it. Heh.
5) The Wishsong of Shannara by Terry Brooks
Parents library. This was my first introduction to standard fantasy after The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. And yes, it is incredibly standard, and you'd think I'd pick something a bit less predictable. But, um. See, the fact is, LotR didn't make a proper impact on me until MUCH later, because while I'd read it early, I possibly read it a bit too early and hadn't completely grasped it. I had a similar problem with trying to read Brooks' Knight of the Word trilogy just after the first Shannara trilogy because I thought it'd be the same thing, and it ... wasn't. However, apparently I read Wishsong at EXACTLY the right time to both get it and like it, and that's why it stuck so hard.
Also Slanter helped. I really loved that pissy little gnome. My Dad loved Garet Jax, the cool, black-clad, death-seeker weapons master, and I think Mam always had a bit of a crush on Allanon (not going to blame her there), but for some reason, I got stuck on the grumpy, treacherous, secretly-decent tracker gnome who didn't even want to be on this blessed quest, this is what you get for getting attached to kids, honestly. All these years later, I do still wonder what that says about me ...
6) Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud
Local library. This one was a much later pick, only a couple of years ago ... Um. Well. Possibly seven or eight, I remember waiting for Ptolemy's Gate to come out. So. After the second book was out, but before the third. However long ago that was? I strongly suspect that I glommed onto this series so hard because Bartimaeus reminded me very, very strongly of several of my formative fictional crushes. Um. Slanter possibly being one of them. This book was aaaallllll about the incredibly sarcastic and unwillingly caring slave djinn for me.
I also loved, however, the way the series made me think about time. The realisation that no matter how far back you go, there is always more past, and it's as much a myth to the people back then as they are to us now. The past is not one single place, but an endless stream of them. It, um. It gave me myth-and-archaeology feels, this series? Heh.
7) The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
Second-hand bookshop. MUCH later pick, this was from my time in college. I picked up a rather battered copy of the first book out of a stack of old Star Trek novelisations in my favourite 2nd-hand, and spent the next while determinedly scrounging for the next two books from wherever looked likely to have them. It's a weird and wonderful mix of old-school Cold War spy fiction with Lovecraftian monstrosities and modern computer tech-ery. I cheerfully admit up front that I don't get a tenth of the maths and computer terms the protagonist constantly spouts, but that's mostly fine because bureaucratic pissery and nightmarish monsters are always easy to follow. Heh. Also, Angleton is so cool. And Mo. And Bob. It's all awesome, and I love it.
8) The Forbidden Game Trilogy by LJ Smith
Local library. Again, one of the earliest series I read. I went through a phase of reading a lot of Point Horror books for a while in my early teens, because the library had a substantial collection of them (Nightmare Hall. So much Nightmare Hall). The Forbidden Game trilogy was the result of that that stuck with me longest. Again, there was a bit of the Norse Myth influence, apparently that's a good way for something to stick with me (see also: Eight Days of Luke by Diana Wynne Jones and American Gods by Neil Gaiman), and also the boogeyman/shadowman/faery king figure that I've been drawn towards since watching The Labyrinth at an impressionable age. Though, really, Forbidden Game was actually early enough to have done some influencing of its own on that score -_-;
But, you know, Julian was cool, Jenny was cool, Dee, Audrey and Michael were awesome, and it was one of those things that I just thoroughly enjoyed. And, um, I admit that when I eventually got around to reading both Dresden Files and Discworld, it was because of FG that I'd heard of the Erlking enough to catch on quick. Heh.
9) Chicot the Jester by Alexandre Dumas Pere
College town library. Again, a much later pick. I found this one initially because of this slash fanvid, which led me to the Russian TV adaptation Grafinya de Monsoro (and also Highlander, I think, since I'm nearly positive I didn't know who Methos was the first time I watched the vid), which led me to checking the city library for the original novel. And lo, in the stacks, they did have it. And I fell in love. Mostly with Chicot, I will admit, because the sly, sneaky jester who saves the kingdom has been a thing for me since watching The Court Jester at, again, an impressionable age. Chicot is fabulous, and more or less exactly the sort of character I love - sneaky and loyal and kind of vicious.
... In hindsight, Slanter has a lot to answer for. *grins sheepishly*
10) Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
Uncle's library. Because if you can't find something weird and wonderful to read on our shelves, you can almost certainly find it on the shelves of our extended family, or family friend's, or, on at least one occasion, a teacher's. (I borrowed the Tales of the Bard trilogy by Michael Scott off one of my primary school teachers DECADES ago and, um, sort of never gave them back? In my defense, he moved counties since then. And possibly forgot. Although I suppose he could have been cursing me for a book thief for the past sixteen odd years. We also robbed several from my mother's colleagues in the English department of my secondary school, although I think we've returned most of those by now). Our big omnibus copy of the Gormenghast trilogy was robbed from my uncle. I can't remember if he gave it up willingly or not, or if he even remembers he had it in the first place. I read it first, and then my sister read it years later after seeing the TV adaptation with Jonathan Rhys Meyers, after which it sort of migrated into her possession for a while.
I loved it mostly for the sense of the Castle of Gormenghast itself. The plot was really cool and Shakespearean, and fortunately I'd actually met Shakespeare's stuff by this stage and could enjoy it on several levels, but it was the oppressive sense of age and malice and dust from the castle itself that I remember most clearly: the layers and layers of pointless tradition, the murderous uprising that Steerpike throws against it. The characters were almost caricatures in many ways, like brightly coloured puppets to play on the dusty, ancient stage, and it was that sense of juxtaposition that made the most impact, I think. Fuschia probably hit me hardest, though, because I remember that first description of her playing in the attics and lumber-rooms and I remember feeling one of the strongest senses of kinship for a character I've ever felt. And then ... well, then the plot happened to her :(
It's possible that Fuschia's fate may have permanently skewed my view of romance. Not that I was all that hot on it in a personal sense to start with, but I suspect Steerpike permanently ruined the 'bad boy'/'mysterious stranger' archetype for me, on the grounds that I'd end up committing suicide by floodwater while my family is murderously brought to ruin around me.
Or, well. Something like that, anyway. *grins crookedly* Real life works exactly like that, doesn't it?
*shakes head* Possibly this list explains something of my childhood, my reading habits and/or my incredibly skewed worldview. *smiles* And, um. Just in case anyone's wondering, we're not usually kleptomaniacs in this family. We're all scrupulous in most areas of life, and will return borrowed money or anything else exactly when we're supposed to. It's just lending us books that's risky. Um. By which I mean, it may serve you best to physically steal it back, in the long run? It's not deliberate, it's just that we forget initially, and then we have to find it again among the thousands of books in the house, and then we have to remember to bring it on the day we're actually meeting you ... There was that one time where we didn't go back to the library for two and a half years because we'd lost our books after moving house, and didn't find them again for that long. One of them we ended up buying in the end, it's probably still somewhere in the house. I think that's the longest time I've ever been away from our local library that wasn't because of college, and it made me feel horribly ashamed. Especially when we brought them back and they forgave us the fines because they weren't going to charge two kids something in excess of 80 pounds. That made me feel like such a horrible person, it really did.
But, yes. We collect books. Lots of books. If it weren't for the existence of libraries and second-hand bookshops, it's possible that our house would literally unlivable. *grins*
And we didn't beg, borrow or steal that tendency, either. Heh.
1) The River Boy by Tim Bowler
Local library. This is one of the earliest books I remember reading there. Well, the actual first book I ever got out of the library was called 'The Tribe With No Feet', which, when I look it up, was written by Vivienne Rae Ellis. There was another one with it, but I was so overwhelmed by my first time in the library that when Dad said 'pick out two books' I just sort of ran at the shelves and picked the first two that looked cool. I only remember that one, possibly because it had that name. But River Boy wasn't long after them, a bit after I'd actually gotten the hang of browsing and stopped being intimidated/overwhelmed by all the choices -_-;
I mostly remember it because it was ... very clean? Cool, calm. It's a story about a girl trying to deal with the fact that her grandfather is dying, and who starts seeing the subject of his last painting in real life: the mysterious river boy, who wants her to swim with him from the source of the local river to the sea forty miles away. Eventually she realises who he is and what his connection to her grandfather is. I think the book stuck with me because it's a very gentle book, a quiet sort of catharsis. I loved it very much, and felt very at peace after reading it.
2) Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
Friend of the family's library. Well, technically not this book, this one I bought for myself, but my first introduction to Discworld in general was a battered copy of Guards Guards from one of my Dad's friends. It took me a while to get the swing of it, but by the time I was thirteen or so I think I was madly in love with the series, and the rest is history.
I'm picking Feet of Clay almost entirely because I feel that WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN is probably the best sentence that Pratchett has ever written. I love some of the other books more, Night Watch in particular, but I think that sentiment is basically the ethos of Discworld for me.
3) Strange Hiding Place by Graham Marks
Local library. This is one of the two books I still regularly get out of the kids section of the library, despite being now almost 26 years old, because sometimes I just want my crummy kids science-fiction, okay? It's about a kid who finds out that his DNA is part of the blueprint of an alien weapon hidden on Earth years ago, and now that the interplanetary war is hotting up, both the aliens that made it and their enemies want it back. The retrieval goes wrong, and poor 11 year old Dez is stuck with one alien protector named Yakob while they try to get the rest of the plans before the enemy does. The scene I remember most is from the first book, where Dez and Yakob are camping out one night in the French countryside, on the run from enemy ships, and Dez scares the pants off Yakob by pulling the flashlight-under-the-chin trick when they hear some wildlife rustling in the bushes. Yakob flips out a little bit and reminds Dez that while he is the cool, armed alien from another planet who knows what he's doing, he's also alone and without back-up on an alien world trying to keep himself and a kid alive against who knows how many enemies, and that means he's under some stress, okay? I think it really struck kid!me, the idea that the adults in the situation can get scared too, and be afraid they're going to let people down and get people hurt because they aren't good enough. It made me feel like the kid could help be the brave one.
So, yeah. I keep coming back to this one, almost twenty years later, though by this stage I'm more the Yakob than the Dez -_-;
4) The Snow Walker Trilogy by Catherine Fisher
Local library. This is the other series I regularly still get out of the kids section, or would do if they hadn't moved it up to the stacks owing to it being almost falling apart. It also might have something to do with my Norse Myth obsession, since it's sort of set in a fantasy Scandinavia. It's about a girl named Jessa and her friend Thorkin, who's parents were part of a rebellion against the evil sorceress who rules their kingdom, and as punishment they're banished north to the abandoned keep where the sorceress keeps her worst monster. Who is not, naturally, at all what they've been led to believe. There are then rebellions and sieges and quests north into the deadly land of the Snow Walkers itself, with darkness and betrayals and magic and surprising heroes.
I think it stuck so hard because it was one of the first times I'd come across the 'monster who isn't as monstrous as those who've treated him as one' concept, but it isn't at all romanticised, and it's a really cool and snow-bound adventure as well. I also just really like it. Heh.
5) The Wishsong of Shannara by Terry Brooks
Parents library. This was my first introduction to standard fantasy after The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. And yes, it is incredibly standard, and you'd think I'd pick something a bit less predictable. But, um. See, the fact is, LotR didn't make a proper impact on me until MUCH later, because while I'd read it early, I possibly read it a bit too early and hadn't completely grasped it. I had a similar problem with trying to read Brooks' Knight of the Word trilogy just after the first Shannara trilogy because I thought it'd be the same thing, and it ... wasn't. However, apparently I read Wishsong at EXACTLY the right time to both get it and like it, and that's why it stuck so hard.
Also Slanter helped. I really loved that pissy little gnome. My Dad loved Garet Jax, the cool, black-clad, death-seeker weapons master, and I think Mam always had a bit of a crush on Allanon (not going to blame her there), but for some reason, I got stuck on the grumpy, treacherous, secretly-decent tracker gnome who didn't even want to be on this blessed quest, this is what you get for getting attached to kids, honestly. All these years later, I do still wonder what that says about me ...
6) Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud
Local library. This one was a much later pick, only a couple of years ago ... Um. Well. Possibly seven or eight, I remember waiting for Ptolemy's Gate to come out. So. After the second book was out, but before the third. However long ago that was? I strongly suspect that I glommed onto this series so hard because Bartimaeus reminded me very, very strongly of several of my formative fictional crushes. Um. Slanter possibly being one of them. This book was aaaallllll about the incredibly sarcastic and unwillingly caring slave djinn for me.
I also loved, however, the way the series made me think about time. The realisation that no matter how far back you go, there is always more past, and it's as much a myth to the people back then as they are to us now. The past is not one single place, but an endless stream of them. It, um. It gave me myth-and-archaeology feels, this series? Heh.
7) The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
Second-hand bookshop. MUCH later pick, this was from my time in college. I picked up a rather battered copy of the first book out of a stack of old Star Trek novelisations in my favourite 2nd-hand, and spent the next while determinedly scrounging for the next two books from wherever looked likely to have them. It's a weird and wonderful mix of old-school Cold War spy fiction with Lovecraftian monstrosities and modern computer tech-ery. I cheerfully admit up front that I don't get a tenth of the maths and computer terms the protagonist constantly spouts, but that's mostly fine because bureaucratic pissery and nightmarish monsters are always easy to follow. Heh. Also, Angleton is so cool. And Mo. And Bob. It's all awesome, and I love it.
8) The Forbidden Game Trilogy by LJ Smith
Local library. Again, one of the earliest series I read. I went through a phase of reading a lot of Point Horror books for a while in my early teens, because the library had a substantial collection of them (Nightmare Hall. So much Nightmare Hall). The Forbidden Game trilogy was the result of that that stuck with me longest. Again, there was a bit of the Norse Myth influence, apparently that's a good way for something to stick with me (see also: Eight Days of Luke by Diana Wynne Jones and American Gods by Neil Gaiman), and also the boogeyman/shadowman/faery king figure that I've been drawn towards since watching The Labyrinth at an impressionable age. Though, really, Forbidden Game was actually early enough to have done some influencing of its own on that score -_-;
But, you know, Julian was cool, Jenny was cool, Dee, Audrey and Michael were awesome, and it was one of those things that I just thoroughly enjoyed. And, um, I admit that when I eventually got around to reading both Dresden Files and Discworld, it was because of FG that I'd heard of the Erlking enough to catch on quick. Heh.
9) Chicot the Jester by Alexandre Dumas Pere
College town library. Again, a much later pick. I found this one initially because of this slash fanvid, which led me to the Russian TV adaptation Grafinya de Monsoro (and also Highlander, I think, since I'm nearly positive I didn't know who Methos was the first time I watched the vid), which led me to checking the city library for the original novel. And lo, in the stacks, they did have it. And I fell in love. Mostly with Chicot, I will admit, because the sly, sneaky jester who saves the kingdom has been a thing for me since watching The Court Jester at, again, an impressionable age. Chicot is fabulous, and more or less exactly the sort of character I love - sneaky and loyal and kind of vicious.
... In hindsight, Slanter has a lot to answer for. *grins sheepishly*
10) Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
Uncle's library. Because if you can't find something weird and wonderful to read on our shelves, you can almost certainly find it on the shelves of our extended family, or family friend's, or, on at least one occasion, a teacher's. (I borrowed the Tales of the Bard trilogy by Michael Scott off one of my primary school teachers DECADES ago and, um, sort of never gave them back? In my defense, he moved counties since then. And possibly forgot. Although I suppose he could have been cursing me for a book thief for the past sixteen odd years. We also robbed several from my mother's colleagues in the English department of my secondary school, although I think we've returned most of those by now). Our big omnibus copy of the Gormenghast trilogy was robbed from my uncle. I can't remember if he gave it up willingly or not, or if he even remembers he had it in the first place. I read it first, and then my sister read it years later after seeing the TV adaptation with Jonathan Rhys Meyers, after which it sort of migrated into her possession for a while.
I loved it mostly for the sense of the Castle of Gormenghast itself. The plot was really cool and Shakespearean, and fortunately I'd actually met Shakespeare's stuff by this stage and could enjoy it on several levels, but it was the oppressive sense of age and malice and dust from the castle itself that I remember most clearly: the layers and layers of pointless tradition, the murderous uprising that Steerpike throws against it. The characters were almost caricatures in many ways, like brightly coloured puppets to play on the dusty, ancient stage, and it was that sense of juxtaposition that made the most impact, I think. Fuschia probably hit me hardest, though, because I remember that first description of her playing in the attics and lumber-rooms and I remember feeling one of the strongest senses of kinship for a character I've ever felt. And then ... well, then the plot happened to her :(
It's possible that Fuschia's fate may have permanently skewed my view of romance. Not that I was all that hot on it in a personal sense to start with, but I suspect Steerpike permanently ruined the 'bad boy'/'mysterious stranger' archetype for me, on the grounds that I'd end up committing suicide by floodwater while my family is murderously brought to ruin around me.
Or, well. Something like that, anyway. *grins crookedly* Real life works exactly like that, doesn't it?
*shakes head* Possibly this list explains something of my childhood, my reading habits and/or my incredibly skewed worldview. *smiles* And, um. Just in case anyone's wondering, we're not usually kleptomaniacs in this family. We're all scrupulous in most areas of life, and will return borrowed money or anything else exactly when we're supposed to. It's just lending us books that's risky. Um. By which I mean, it may serve you best to physically steal it back, in the long run? It's not deliberate, it's just that we forget initially, and then we have to find it again among the thousands of books in the house, and then we have to remember to bring it on the day we're actually meeting you ... There was that one time where we didn't go back to the library for two and a half years because we'd lost our books after moving house, and didn't find them again for that long. One of them we ended up buying in the end, it's probably still somewhere in the house. I think that's the longest time I've ever been away from our local library that wasn't because of college, and it made me feel horribly ashamed. Especially when we brought them back and they forgave us the fines because they weren't going to charge two kids something in excess of 80 pounds. That made me feel like such a horrible person, it really did.
But, yes. We collect books. Lots of books. If it weren't for the existence of libraries and second-hand bookshops, it's possible that our house would literally unlivable. *grins*
And we didn't beg, borrow or steal that tendency, either. Heh.
