Meme: Top 5 favorite reads

[hobgoblinn]

Tagged by angelmischa. Here are my top 5 favorite books, that I can remember in my current state of extreme stress and beer induced wooziness. Due to said wooziness, they are in no particular order:

Carole Nelson Douglas' Goodnight, Mr. Holmes and its sequels.
I also am fond of Laurie King's Sherlock Holmes pastiches and her other, non-holmesian fiction, but This is the series I go back to more often. The narrative voice of Penelope "Nell" Huxleigh is fresh and inventive, a worthy sidekick to that other great sleuth and mind of the age, Irene Adler, and a wonderful counterpoint to Holmes' Watson. How these character keep interacting, and how Nell changes over the course of the series, is really wonderfully fun to watch. Yeah, it's fanfic of a sort, but it, as all really good fanfic does, tells us more about the characters we know from canon, and about ourselves. I hope CND revisits this universe sometime. I have never been able to get through her Midnight Louie books (hard boiled detective who happens to be a cat. Sounds like a fantastic and funny idea on paper, but I just can't get into that world.)

Pamela Dean - Tam Lin
I found this one on an honor paperbacks rack in a library years ago and fell in love with it. Blackstock is a lot like where I went to college, too, and I found I identified a lot with the narrator, Janet, especially when she was explaining to someone why she was an English major, something like: "Look, if somebody offered you a lot of money to read books all day and that was your favorite thing to do, wouldn't you do it?" The urban fantasy world created here, and the mystery, is creepy and compelling, and the allusions to Shakespeare and to Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and of course to the ballad version of Tam Lin are really well executed. I found this recently at Half Price Books and snatched it up-- I think it's been out of print for some time.

JK Rowling - first three HP books.
These three books had been published when I decided to read the first to see what all the fuss was about, and whether or not I thought they were suitable for my then 9 year old son (not Wee Hob, but his older brother. Check the St. Crispin's Day and Anniversary Dates tags for details if you're curious.) All the continuity errors and narrative infelicities aside, and the train wreck of theme and message later in the series aside, these books had such a profound effect on me at the time that, in all three cases, I Immediately began rereading the one I had just completed because I couldn't check the next one out yet from the library, and I loved her world so much I didn't want to leave it.

Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
I love anything by Orson Scott Card, really-- such a gifted storyteller, and he writes great fanfiction (in the good sense) of his own work. The way he goes back and retells Ender's Game from other viewpoints is really neat. I'd classify my reaction to this as the same as to Heinlein's Space Cadet, only the book and the writing are more complex and satisfying for an adult. I almost suggested it to Wee Hob, but decided to reread first recently and-- yeah. He's a little young, yet. But He's a lot like Ender Wiggin, in his courage and his ability to figure things out, and I can see him someday really liking this world.

Charles de Lint - Jack of Kinrowan (Jack the Giant Killer and its sequel Drink Down the Moon in one volume).
This one was probably my first exposure to the Urban Fantasy Genre, and in fact I was bummed some years later to read Memory and Dream and realize that what he was up to there was the same thing I was doing with my then and still half finished first novel. Only Better of Course. But the twists on the Jack the Giant Killer fairy tales in this series (Jack's a woman named "Jackie", for starters) are really clever, and the energy and inventiveness of the tale and the world carry you along. I'd love to live in de Lint's world, where magic and the otherworld are Real for those who can see it. I love other authors in this mold like Neil Gaiman, but I have to admit a soft spot for de Lint, who introduced me to the genre.

I won't tag anyone, but if you do it, ping me with a link, as I may be a bit busy this weekend.

Comments

[mad-queen-mab.livejournal.com]

I love Ender's Game; one of my favorite moments as a reader thus far in my life was reading the big twist/reveal as a twelve year old. I just sat there, agog. It was set up so perfectly... i *should* have seen it coming but somehow just didn't. And then the final image/line slays me every time.

[hobgoblinn.livejournal.com]

You read Ender's Game as a 12 year old? Or am I misreading there? My Wee Hob is 13 and I thought he would really get into the war game/ boarding school with null gravity and laser guns thing. But the psychological games and the violence are a little much for him just now, especially given his history and issues. Glad I reread it again first. I'd forgotten that part and was just remembering the aspects I know would appeal to him.

[mad-queen-mab.livejournal.com]

I did read Ender's Game as a twelve year old...I was a crazy advanced reader but a mess in all things math/science related (if it didn't have a narrative, I just wasn't interested) and my sixth grade teacher got me reading SciFi as a way to get me interested in the aspects of school I was near to failing. I don't remember being all that disturbed by the brutality and mind games until I read it again as an adult; as a child at least all fiction was equally unpredictable and equally divorced from reality, if that makes sense. So Ender vs Bonzo Madrid wasn't all that much more upsetting than, say, Laura Ingalls vs the Nellie Olson because I was into plot!plot!plot and a lot of the emotional stuff only started to resonate once I had the capacity and experience to comprehend it (all of a sudden I'd "get" a book that I'd been much too young for, often without having to re-read it).