entirely ruined her disposition with books

I revised my books list--I replaced individual volumes with series to get it right at 100 and added a few childhood faves I had forgotten. I'm much happier with this list!

[eta] I forgot Encyclopedia Brown!!!

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you, 1 book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews: just covers.



The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

Tell me about a beginning to a story that you love! Books, tv, movies, whatever! Something that grabbed you and didn't let you go! This can be single lines or whole scenes or whatever!


Some of my favorites:

+ “I lost an arm on my last trip home.” The opening page of Kindred by Octavia Butler, which grabbed me so hard that I read the whole thing in one sitting!

+ The Killers (1946). This is a solid noir but the rest of it just does not live up to the opening scene, which contains characters we never see again. We're in a diner in a small town around dinner time, and two strangers walk in...

+ Severance episode one. A woman wakes up on a conference table in a windowless conference room. A voice speaks to her over a speaker phone. WTF is going???? Some of the most effective in medias res I've ever seen!

+ Till We Have Faces:

I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew.

Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write. I will accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain. That is, I will tell all he has done to me from the very beginning, as if I were making my complaint of him before a judge. But there is no judge between gods and men, and the god of the mountain will not answer me.

Goosebumps!

+ Spindle's End by Robin McKinley:

The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like sticky plaster-dust. (House-cleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your kettle of its encrustation of magic at least once a week, because if you didn't, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn't have to be anything scary or unpleasant, especially in a cheerful household - magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself -- but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender-and-gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory.)

+ The opening scenes of Friday Night Lights. Honestly that whole pilot, which is a masterclass all its own. It's Monday morning, and we see the people of Dillon, Texas getting ready for their day. The voice-overs aren't voice-overs: they're the talk radio show where they're talking about the most exciting thing in town: Friday night's high school football game. It's a hell of a way to introduce us to this world and its priorities.

+ The opening scene of The Hour. Maybe it's just me, but having Ben Whishaw speak directly to the camera and announce, "The newsreels read," is a brilliant way to get me to care about something. Lol

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you, 1 book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews: just covers.



The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Thanks to dolorosa_12 for linking to some interesting musings on cozy fantasy. I appreciated this article by Liz Bourke that made me articulate to myself why I just Cannot with the cozy genre (whether in fantasy or mystery) despite being very into domesticity and interiority. Bourke frames it as the opposite but reflection of grimdark stuff: fiction that lacks in tonal contrast. I think this is true. She elucidates this as being very different from other things that get labeled as "cozy" but that are really domesticity or interiority. These things can overlap on Venn diagrams and often do, but they aren't the same thing. I personally adore domesticity and interiority in my stories, but hate stories that lack that tonal contrast.

That's what I like about Robin McKinley--she can go full domestic (as in Chalice, Deerskin, Spindle's End, Rose Daughter, parts of Sunshine) without losing that tonal contrast, and so I eat it with a spoon. But if something's too fluffy, I am out of there. Also out of there if something is too grimdark. I have a very well-honed receptor that figures out early on in a story whether it's going to be in the temperate zone, and if it's not, I nope right out.

My idea kind of story--of any genre, whether fanfiction or original--is something that goes really angsty or poignant so that the happy ending (and I prefer happy endings most of the time) feels earned. I personally feel cheated if I read a happy ending that doesn't feel earned, that feels too easy.

Sometimes I will read a short fanfic about people being happy, but that is only because they already earned that happiness in canon. And I honestly don't read many of those.

I don't like cotton candy. I don't like the food and I don't like the literary equivalent. I've always been a savory person, both with food and with stories. I want things to feel emotionally real. I want the emotions to be realistic no matter how imaginative and alien the world is. I like dramas more than comedies, in general, but the comedies I like have enough realistic characterization/relationships/arcs that I can love them.

But of course the opposite is true too. I don't want to eat only vegetables. I don't like grimdark stuff. Things that are completely humorless strike me as unrealistic too! Life has humor! At least a glimmer of it! In even the worst circumstances. Life has hope! Life has relationships!

One of my favorite professors in undergrad used to say that literature is something that tells us, "This is what it feels like to be human." (Even if it's about aliens or unicorns, it's telling us something about how we are human.) And if something doesn't have both good and bad, laughter and tears, hope and heartbreak...it just doesn't feel human to me, and so what is the point? The line between good and evil does indeed run directly through the human heart, and no story that doesn't have both (even if in not-concentrated versions) just has no appeal for me.

I like this thought too:

It’s illuminating to compare the modern “cosy mystery” genre with the mystery novels written in the 1920s and 1930s to which they are sometimes compared – or the 1940s and 1950s – and find in the originals much less of an urge towards the comfortable.

AGREED. The Golden Age books tend to be deceptively cozy--if you scratch the surface, there's always a darkness or discomfort there. Which is just not true modern cozies. This is why I can read a Patricia Wentworth book, but not a modern cozy, even if, at first glance, they seem similar.



Now, all of this is a preference thing. Other people don't need that tonal contrast the way I do, and that's fine. I'm not judging anyone for what they choose to read/watch/whatever. I do think that Bourke is right that we can see the trend towards either grimdark or cozy as saying something about our cultural moment (basically, a retreat from moral complexity in one direction or the other), but that's not the same thing as judging people. If people want to wallow in the cozy right now because the real world sucks so hard, good for them. But I am never going to read those stories. They aren't for me.

If you don’t have the contrast of something bitter, sweetness can be very one-note. But bitterness, or even seriousness, to excess also becomes a form of monotony. Both modes often suffer – in an artistic, rather than commercial sense – from rejecting tonal contrast, and the potential of such contrast to highlight different parts of the human condition, and thus move the audience to reflect more deeply on the work and on themselves. It is in both cases a rejection of emotional complexity as well as moral complexity.

Yes, exactly.




I also enjoyed Wesley Osam's considerably snarkier thoughts on Legends and Lattes mostly because I know that I would have the same reaction if I read the book. Which is why I'm not reading the book!

I often wish more fantasy novels would focus on ordinary lives. Literature in general is not about adventure, but about… well, life. What it means to be a person in the world, even (especially) an ordinary person who is not going to save it.

And then Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes came along. And I said, “No, not like that.”

SAME, bro!

And also:

Instead, this is genre as warm fuzzy blanket. Unlike almost everything else in this review, this is not a criticism; there’s a place for fuzzy blanket books. I just don’t think there’s any reason they can’t have ambitions along some other axis, even as they build a cozily familiar world.

Yes! I actually think that Chalice has a cozily familiar world in some ways, but just because the worldbuilding feels at first glance like cottagecore doesn't mean that a) the details can't feel realistic and b) the plot and character arcs can't be more textured. There's a whole section of The Hero and the Crown where Aerin is trying to figure out how to make fire-repellent so that she can fight dragons and she's working with smelly herbs and keeps getting singed, and what other writer is doing that? Rose Daughter is as much about gardening as it is about falling in love with the Beast. Then you've got something like Deerskin, which has one long stretch that is essentially about how to live alone in a cabin in the woods by yourself and another long stretch that is about how to raise tiny puppies, and you just don't read stuff like that very often outside of classic middle grade chapter books! (Of course, the backdrop of the book is horrific trauma, so....) Honestly, imo, nobody does cottagecore-for-emotional-realists like McKinley. To me, she perfectly balances that aesthetic with actual emotional heft. Her attention to domestic details and the work of women is married to a beautiful world full of characters with actual struggles. I long for more writers doing the same! No one else scratches that itch for me!

I made a most influential albums list. I basically went through my iTunes and put down every album that I've listened to many times, no matter how embarrassing (see: Christian music from my childhood--I actually didn't include ALL of those, just the ones that I listened to most. Otherwise this list would have a lot of WOW albums from the late 90s and early 2000s, among other embarrassing stuff). It ended up being 160 lol.

Of course, this is only albums--there are songs that are super important to me that would not be included on such a list. But I have always been an albums listener instead of a singles listener, so this seems like a better way to do it.

I also did not include any classical music--Bernstein conducting Aaron Copland isn't here, for instance, or the Beethoven my dad used to play, etc. The closest I get is, like, John Williams.

It's funny how some of these reflect albums I just happened to stumble over in, like, the Celtic section of my public library--quite a few of these were so obscure I had to add them myself.


My main conclusion after looking it over is that I am extremely white.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you, 1 book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews: just covers.




The Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley

There's a meme going around Tumblr where you make a list of your 100 favorite movies on this site, and then people can see how many of them they've seen.

Being me, I also made ones for books and tv, too.

So if you're so inclined, you can see how many of my favorite tv shows and movies you've seen and how many of my favorite books you have read.

And even if no one is so inclined, it was still fun to make. Like I said over there, I am a librarian. Of course my idea of a good Friday night is making lists.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you, 1 book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews: just covers.



Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin