A quick book meme

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - most of middle school was devoted to these, and I still have a whole shelf of Tolkien and related books.

2. The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice - One of my very favourite books, which will probably always be able to remind me of high school.

3. 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff - I've talked about this recently enough that I needn't say why it's on this list, but it is a lovely book.

4. Tam Lin by Pamela Dean - my favourite book of all.

5. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman - The whole trilogy, really, but I probably remember this one the best. They're thoroughly wonderful.

5. Sandry's Book by Tamora Pierce - All of Tamora Pierce's novels, especially the earlier ones, stick with me, but I always loved this one especially well.

6. Emma by Jane Austen - need I say more? I've spent enough time on this one lately.

7. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling - I'll always be glad I had the good timing to grow up with these books, and they really are wonderful stories.

8. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley - I need to reread this, but it did have a big effect on me when I read it, and I remember it extremely fondly.

9. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell - I don't even know why I love this one so much, but Elizabeth Gaskell has an indefinable quality that makes me love her.

10. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott - I read this a little too late to have a childhood fondness for it, but I love it nonetheless.

11. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - this used to have fights with Tam Lin over being my favourite book, and I still love it.

12. On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder - I had to include a favourite children's book, and this is the one I was always fondest of.

13. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransom - I loved these when I was a child, and they are some of the few books that I love in exactly the same way as an adult.

14. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh - this just has some really rather magical qualities to it.

15. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt - it's enormous and vivid and lovely, is all.

Inspiration

Apart from Victorian poetry, The Children's Book is also making me want to draw. I was sitting in a study/lounge room downstairs reading the book, and I kept having visions of giant (probably too ambitious for my abilities) pencil drawings, and being completely distracted from the book by the compulsive urge to go start drawing them.

Combine this with the urges I'm having to sew, make jewellery, make Ukrainian eggs, decorate for Christmas, and bake things, none of which I'm really able to do in a dorm room, I'm getting very distracted both from schoolwork and from my other reading.

I'm still quite wrapped up in The Children's Book, despite this. It's a book that needs to be savoured, and I am duly savouring it, but this is a problem given that it's due back at the library next Tuesday, and can't be renewed. I may have to just let it go overdue (sorry, waiting people), and hope I have time to finish it over the Thanksgiving break.

There's something special about a book that inspires you to other things. This book both to read poetry and to create things, for me. Tam Lin, of course, is my classic poetry and Shakespeare inspiration. I love reading poetry, so it's always nice to have this boost, and I never have the urge to draw unless something in particular inspires me to it. There's also an element wherein this allows you to draw out the experience of reading the inspiration book. You have to pause and indulge your inspiration, even if you want to keep reading.

I don't know if I can think of any other books I've read that particularly inspire me to things (though I'm sure there are some that make me want to write). What books have this effect on you?

Birthday Greetings

Ursula K. Le Guin is apparently 80 today! Happy Birthday! I totally had no idea she was that old. Neat.

I've read a few of her books, the first three or so of the Earthsea ones and Gifts. My memory of these is somewhat vague, though I remember really liking Gifts. At any rate Ursula K. Le Guin is such a giant of fantasy, and such a classic. I should probably read more of her books.

In other news--my mother is reading Tam Lin! Completely without my forcing her to. She's not even reading my copy.

The essentials

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Beowulf
The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice
Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott
The Song of the Lioness Quartet by Tamora Pierce
The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

These are the books I am taking to college. They are the books I consider indispensable, whether because I am likely to have a sudden urge to read them or because it simply feels wrong to be without them. Bear in mind that this stack would be a lot taller if I were going farther away from home. Also consider that all of Jane Austen would be on there if I had not decided not to bring anything I know I can find online. The Complete Works of Shakespeare might actually get added to this pile, I haven't decided yet. Schott's Original Miscellany isn't really indispensable, I suppose, but it's the sort of random useful little thing that I think it might be nice to have. The Amber Spyglass would be in this pile also, except that I can't find it, I only have a hardcover (which I was trying to avoid bringing), and if I actually read the first two that'll give me time to find the third one.

The Clouds of Witness and Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers
Ha'penny by Jo Walton
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje

These are my selections off my to-read pile that I think I might actually have a chance of getting around to. The Dorothy Sayers because they're short reads and will be a nice change from all the books I'll be reading for classes, Ha'penny because I'm in the middle of it, the Obama book because it's the university common book and I haven't read it yet (but I think it might be my next house book), and The Cinnamon Peeler because I might feel the need for some poetry.

I find it interesting to have it put to the test which books I think I can't live without. There is, for example, pretty much zero chance of my reading Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit. Tolkien's an old love for me, a little faded and diverged more into reading his letters and essays. But despite the fact that the books are just going to sit in by tiny dorm room taking up space, I can't live without them. The others are all comfort books, which given a college reading load is likely to be the only thing I get around to reading (though we'll hold out hope for the unread pile).

Those photos, by the way, were taken in my back yard, and look how sunny it is. Oh, Seattle, rain in August and 85 degrees on the autumn equinox.

Next you hear from me, I'll be typing from my dorm room!

There's many a man hath more hair than wit

And here's proof of what Tam Lin does to my reading--not just Euripides but Shakespeare, E.R. Eddison, and a smattering of poets. I finished Tam Lin, promptly got out the Norton Anthology and just as promptly gave this over for my Complete Works of Shakespeare, and read Comedy of Errors. I've never seen this play, and not read it before. Shakespeare in the park was doing it this summer, and I did very much mean to go see it but with one thing and another never did. It's a very interesting play though in some ways distinguishes itself from the others, and I begin to see how greatly varied Shakespeare's plays can be. There's less of romance than most of the comedies I'm familiar with. By the formula of those I've read before, the comedy and the errors should be in mistaken identity which turns out funny situations between lovers, but not one of these characters is really much of a lover. It's a very funny play. I noticed far more couplets than seems usual, and is it just me or is this rather a shorter play? But I liked it. It's more symmetrical and better tied off than Twelfth Night.

Having finished both Tam Lin and Comedy or Errors, I then got the great joy of choosing a new book off the stack. I'm still reading The Mother Tongue, mind you, but slowly, and I like to have a novel on the go at the same time. So I picked The Worm Ouroboros, which I've already started and put aside twice, and which is a Tam Lin-associated book so hopefully that particular wave of reading inspiration will last me the book, at least until it begins to carry its own weight.

This evening, the lasting effects of Tam Lin in combination with watching History Boys produced a desire for some poetry, so I hauled out another literature textbook I for unknown reasons possess, and read a bit. For some reason Keats' "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" is at present particularly in my mind (maybe because Homer is), despite a little whirlwind tour of modern poetry (which according to this book begins with Hardy). I still associate "silent, upon a peak in Darien." with Swallows and Amazons. The poem in general I associate with Tam Lin, but the bit about Darien is all Swallows and Amazons.

Had I read something out of the 18th century and something medieval, I'd have sort of done a stop on my tour in at least one bit of every age, and I did do drama, novel, and poetry, which is rather a lot for one day, really. I have to confess I have gotten pretty much nothing done but reading.

Tam Lin

I've never done a proper post about Tam Lin, though I mention it all the time. I even promised one in my very first post here, the last time I reread it.

I've read every novel Pamela Dean has written, and am terribly excited about the new one she's writing, especially since she hasn't published one since 1998. Tam Lin is my favourite, though I have a certain fondness for The Secret Country trilogy.

You may or may not know the story of the ballad of Tam Lin--I didn't the first time I read the book, and I think my enjoyment of it benefited from this. I was so wrapped up in the story I didn't even realize who Tam Lin was. Though I was completely surprised by the story's outcome on my first reading, knowing the ending has done no harm to my rereadings.

Janet Carter, our heroine and the character through whom, despite the third person telling, we view the story, is a freshman at Blackstock College in 1971. She's an English major, and her father is an English professor at Blackstock, so she's been reading Shakespeare and Keats since she was small. She has two roommates, Molly and Tina, and sundry Classics major friends, notably Nick, Thomas, and Robin. The book plows through her freshman year, meals in various dining halls with unfortunate food, trips to see Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, walks around campus, and a good dose of suspicious, slightly supernatural events, then moves on to tell the rest of her time at Blackstock, ending fall of her senior year. There is much talk of college life, classes fascinating and dull alike, studying, love affairs, friendships and their problems. It is this couching of relative ordinariness that shows the extraordinary parts of the story so well, and that distracts us from putting together all the clues. We learn in the first few pages that Classics majors are a little weird--it's a campus joke even Janet's little brother finds funny. We soon learn that the whole Classics department is suspicious, and then of course Janet has to deal with the ghost that throws books out the window of her dorm room. And whether or not you know the story of Tam Lin and can predict how it will turn out for Janet, there are still mysteries left to solve.

Why do I love this book so very much? First of all, Pamela Dean is a lovely writer--dryly humorous, and so very good at the urban fantasy genre, giving us the bits of normal life as well as the fantasy, so that it all seems so much more believable. Secondly, the book is absolutely full of literary references; they're all quoting constantly and making parallels with bits of literature. On the one hand this is idealistically pleasing, since wouldn't it be lovely to be able to quote Shakespeare all the time and have people who could quote him back to you? I always thought it would, or maybe I just discovered Pamela Dean's novels and realized I would have loved to grow up reading Shakespeare. On the other hand, it's easy to make these references a game, seeing which ones you catch and then rereading the book again later and catching more of them, some maybe you hadn't first realized were references at all. And as I mentioned yesterday, Tam Lin always inspires me to more reading, which can't be anything but good. Third, for ages this has been my college book. I read it for a view of college and always envy Janet all she gets to learn. Blackstock is heavily based on Carleton College (minus the suspicious Classics department and the ghosts, of course), and this is pretty much the main reason I applied to Carleton. I didn't get in, but still Tam Lin had a definite effect on where I applied to college and perhaps also how I made my decision. It's a bit fitting that I read it a month before I start college, but it's just made me impatient. I want to start learning things now.

Tam Lin is both a comfort read and a book that inspires me to read a little outside my comfort-zone, and though perhaps it's not the best book ever written, I can pretty confidently call it my favourite.

Impulse and desire

I'm rereading Tam Lin, and I'd totally forgotten how much it makes me want to read the classics. The English sort and the Greek and Roman sort. I usually wind up digging out my Norton Anthology of English Literature. So I sat down with one of Euripides' plays out of one of my textbooks. I picked Helen, because it's not the play I know I'll have to read for class and I particularly like the bits of Greek myth related to the Trojan War.

I have a sort of funny relationship to Greek literature. For some unknown reason of unknown origins, I always really wanted a classical education, the sort of thing taught in British public schools a century ago. I wanted to be taught Greek and Latin, and maybe French and German too, and be made to read all the classics. I really have no idea where I got this particular desire, but it's stuck with me. Going to an (often not very rigorous) alternative school wasn't especially conducive to this kind of education, though I did wind up reading a couple of Greek plays and some (very minimal) Shakespeare. Otherwise most of the books I've read that are usually taught in school I read just because I wanted to. Fortunately the benefit of said alternative school was being encouraged to go in my own directions, and whatever reading I did outside of class being credited towards my graduation (it thus looks from my transcript like I took eight years of English classes in my four years of high school). Still, I don't feel like I've read all the things I should.

Every time I reread Tam Lin all this comes to mind. This book is absolutely full of literary allusions, and every time I read it I pick up on more of them. I always take the reading as an opportunity to read more of the books Janet mentions reading in her classes--my ultimate goal is to have read all of them. Every time I reread Tam Lin, I get a little closer, feel a little more well-read. I'm looking forward to college largely to have classes as an excuse to work my way towards this goal.

As for Helen--I rather enjoyed it, though I do think literature this old is the better for having a teacher to explain it. I should, I suppose, have read the introduction, but that felt like taking the momentum out of my impulse. I was rather surprised by my finishing the play itself. We'll see what else Tam Lin inspires me to impulse-read.

So many books, so little space

I just got my dorm assignment for the fall, so now I'm really starting to think about what I'm bringing with me. I'm not going very far, so I'll be able to come home for anything I want, but sometimes you just want to have things there to hand exactly when the thought first occurs to you.

In terms of books... They tell you not to bring anything apart from a few favourites because you'll be too busy reading for classes, and looking at the stack of books I bought the other day for just one class I totally believe this.

I've come up with the brilliant plan that I will bring nothing that is in the public domain, since if it is it can be found in the Great Holy Place of Literature, Ridiculousness, and Geekery We Call the Internet. Plus in virtual form it will be easily searchable thanks to the wonders of Ctrl+f, and I doubt I'll be looking it up for anything but reference.

So I won't bring reference books. And let's face it, I'm sharing an 11' by 15' room with two other people, so unless I want to sleep with books in my bed like stuffed animals (which, er, isn't unheard of in my world) I won't have room for very many.

What books do I think I'll have a sudden desperate urge to read and not be able to wait the half-hour bus ride to get them from home? They'll be comfort books, ones I've already read countless times. Tam Lin, no doubt, will be a necessity. I suspect the His Dark Materials trilogy will make the trip. I might also consider Harry Potter, a couple of Tamora Pierce books, and maybe the most compact copies I have of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. This is already taking up a lot of space. And I should probably bring that Barack Obama book I'd forgot about, which we're all supposed to have read. And maybe a couple of the books left on my to-read pile after the summer's over. And where am I going to put my shoes?

We'll see how this pans out. I'm already looking at that list and making cuts.

Summer reading pile

When I was cleaning my room a couple weeks ago, I finally got around to pulling out all the books that are scattered here and there that I know are on my to-read list, and stacking them up. Most of these are books on my list for the summer; I know there are others I mean to read but they're a little further off. Seven of them I've already started (some long enough ago that I'll probably just start over); Tam Lin of course I've read several times, but I'm due for a reread. Two are library books, most I own, a surprising five are nonfiction, four are children's books. Also in the picture, my stack of Dorothy L. Sayers that I mentioned the other day. Those, really, are rather longer term than just this summer, but I'd like to get in a couple more of them. The Barack Obama book is the UW's common book for all freshmen; in theory we'll all have read it and can thus meet people by starting conversation about it. Many of these books I've talked about before, so I won't go over them in detail again, but you can expect to hear more about them in the near future.

Funny, apparently the French tilt their heads to the right instead of the left when browsing the bookshelves, because I had to turn that copy of the French translation of Harry Potter face down so you could read the spine.

Snow!

It snowed like crazy here last night, and it's supposed to be below freezing and potentially snowy for the next several days. I am extremely happy, although there are some school things going on that really need to happen and that may not happen if they call a snow day. I love snow so much. Last night we all bundled up and went outside in the dark and made snowmen, threw snowballs, caught snowflakes on our tongues. I don't think I've ever actually seen snow on the freeway before. It was pretty nifty. I hear this winter's supposed to be colder than it's been in years.

Anyway, in recognition of the snow, I thought I'd go through the list of books I've read the past two years and pick out the ones I think are best read on a snowy day.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
I can't recall that there's much snow in this book. I feel like there is, but I may be wrong. Even if it doesn't have the snow, it does have a certain element of warm fireplaces and really solid, paper smelling bibliophilia. It is a rather dense sort of book, and I always feel like dense books warm you up, which makes them rather good for winter. It's like the fact that they have a lot of plot amounts to insulation.

The book tells the story of a writer, Vida Winter, who invites a young, rather obscure biographer named Margaret Lea to her house in Yorkshire to write her biography. Through the years, every time a journalist has ever asked for her life story, Vida Winter has told them something different, and now that she is dying she wants to tell the true story at last. The book flickers between the story of Vida Winter's childhood and Margaret Lea's discovery of it, and it never quite reveals the whole story at once until finally it all comes to you in a whoosh. There's a lot in this book about families, and especially about twins, and generally I think the fact that I read it over a year ago and the details are still almost entirely clear in my mind says something for it.

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean
Have I enthused about Tam Lin here before? It's my very favourite book, although not necessarily the very best that I have ever read. It's the sort of book that I want to foist upon everyone I meet, except that I couldn't stand it if they didn't like it so I have to pick and choose carefully who I foist it upon.

It is based, obviously, on the Scottish ballad of Tam Lin, only it is set on a Minnesota liberal arts college campus in the early 1970s. Our heroine is Janet, who is rather frank and thoroughly bookish, and an English major. My favourite part about the book is the way the fantastical elements are so perfectly woven in with the scenes of ordinary college life. It's not just the story of Tam Lin, either; there are other bits of fabulousness thrown in there.

Really, it's my book of all seasons. It covers almost four years, so you get a little of everything, and I've read it four or five times in seasons as widely varying as November and June. It is an eminently rereadable book--there are so many well placed and often hard to pick out literary references, and every time I read the book I'm able to find and understand a few more of them. But I doubt I will every get them all. There is definitely snow here--what stands out to me is sledding down hills on cafeteria trays.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Need I explain this one? People call the film versions Christmas movies, even though they're not Christmas movies in the same sense as Rudolph or Frosty the Snowman. Warm fireplaces, mittens, and cold snow, plus one big generally happy family. It's a good snow book. I am making myself want to reread it.

Endymion Spring by Matthew Skelton
This is one I read a little bit randomly last January, because my mother brought home an advance proof and it looked interesting. I have to confess my memory of it is slightly muddled, but I know I enjoyed it a great deal. It involves old books, Johann Gutenberg, a couple of modern kids, and Oxford. There's some switching around of time periods, jumping from the story of an apprentice of Gutenberg to the two modern kids discovering this story, getting into trouble, and trying to keep a certain very special book from getting into the wrong hands. The book definitely has fantastical elements, and I suppose it's technically a kid's book. But it's very good, often exciting, occasionally creepy, and throws in some nice historical tidbits. And I do recall some 16th century German snow.

Booking Through Thursday---on a Thursday!

Here is today's Booking Through Thursday:

Are there any particular worlds in books where you’d like to live?
Or where you certainly would NOT want to live?
What about authors? If you were a character, who would you trust to write your life?

I'd very much like to live in the Villa San Girolamo in The English Patient. I could do without the mines all over, but the room the English patient lives in sounds wonderful, and the fact that it's all crumbling would just make it better--it would be a bit like living in the past, but with present, living flowers all around you. The world outside the villa, however, not so much. And in reality, of course, I might not like it so much. But for a visit that would be great.

The Oxford of To Say Nothing of the Dog I'd also be pretty keen on, because what's better than living in Oxford and being able to time travel?

I can't actually think of a place in a book that I would really not want to live, although I'm sure such a place is out there. I think I probably avoid books that are about places that I would not for any reason want to live in. There are lots of books that I would not actually want to live in even if there are appealing bits of them, but none that sound wholly unpleasant.

As for an author who I'd like to write my life--overall, I think Pamela Dean could do a creditable job of it, but that's mostly because I like her writing so much. I think if we're talking about my life at present and somebody writing a novel about me as I am now, I'd like Eva Rice to have a go at it. She wrote The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, which was a great book, with a main character who is about my age, and which captures incredibly well being that age. Something in that book, though none of the events or the settings or anything much about it resembles my life, something really reminded me of myself.

Man can do nothing without the make believe of a beginning.

It does seem a little silly to start blogging about one's favourite books with George Eliot, whose writing I don't enjoy very much. I've read about half of Daniel Deronda, and would like to finish it, and I rather admire George Eliot for writing the thickest prose I've ever come across, but it's not something I jump up and down about. There are, however, a couple of great quotes from her that I tend to use liberally. At least one of them I don't think I use with the meaning she intended it to have, but it's brilliantly apt if I use my own meaning.

So, I already have a livejournal, which I do post in with some semblance of regularity. But livejournal somehow is not Blogging, and there is something appealing about Blogging. At any rate, here lies literary squee, philosophical rambles, and probably my amusing forays into language (Example: in the French translation of Harry Potter, lemon drops seem to have become 'lemon Eskimos'. I haven't the faintest idea why, unless it is some strange idiom).

I have finished four books in the last two days, which seems highly creditable. These being Tam Lin (Pamela Dean, and about a fourth reread), The Summer Book (Tove Jansson, who is also creator of the Moomins--did you know they started out as an anti-Fascist political cartoon?), North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell), and Prince Caspian (C.S. Lewis).

Tam Lin, is, as always fabulous. Probably at some point I will post at length about it. The Summer Book was short and sweet, and in an interesting manner not at all my feeling of summer. It does convey summer very well, but it doesn't convey my summer at all, and it's interesting to find one that feels so different. The book is a sort of rambling series of vignettes about a six-year-old called Sophia and her dying Grandmother, who live on an island in Finland. I was rather amused to find the foreward was written by Kathryn Davis, who wrote that book called Versailles that I keep meaning to finish and that I just discovered I have two copies of.

North and South was lovely. I was not at all expecting it to end in quite the way it did. I don't mean in terms of plot, but it always rather interests me to see how people choose to wrap up a book. Whether in a long happily-ever-after sort of paragraph, or a vaguely pretentious sounding philosophical statement (my usual ending of choice), or a bit of rather amusing but apt dialogue. And I was surprised to find North and South going the way of the dialogue. It doesn't strike me as something that usual appears in Victorian literature. Anyway, I am quite confirmed in my fondness for Elizabeth Gaskell, who even when writing about grey dreary Milton, still seems to make everything terribly charming.

Once again, I find myself not particularly entranced by Narnia. I listened to Prince Caspian on tape in one go while sewing, and kept being completely astonished by how fast it went by. Yes, it's a short book, but most books that short take more time to do everything. I can just imagine what Tolkien would have done with it, and seem to remember that he never much liked Narnia. He had the same sort of complaint I do. After the vast mythology behind Lord of the Rings, Narnia comes off as flat. I think I would have liked it better had I read it when I was eight or nine.