a million times a trillion more (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dolorosa_12) wrote2013-08-31 04:03 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2013-08-31 04:03 pm
An appropriate-iconed books meme
I seem to be on fire with blogging at the moment. It's probably partly procrastination, but I do genuinely have stuff to say! Today, it's an A to Z book/reading meme.
AUTHOR YOU’VE READ THE MOST BOOKS FROM:
I've never actually bothered to count, but it's probably one of the prolific Australian children's/YA writers of my childhood. I think I've read everything Robin Klein ever wrote - Hating Alison Ashley was such a favourite of mine for about two years that I could quote it from memory - and the same goes for Jackie French. John Marsden, Gillian Rubinstein and Victor Kelleher probably come in a close second. I've really cooled on French over the past few years, mainly because the books of hers I had to review for the paper had flaws I couldn't overlook, but the works of the others all still stand the test of time. (And I can't be too mad at French, because I sent her a letter and a copy of a picture book I made when I was 10, and she wrote an incredibly detailed letter back to me and signed my copy of Rainstones...)
Actually, now that I think about it, I probably read the most books by Ann M. Martin, Francine Pascal or one of those other formulaic authors of the late '80s and early '90s.
BEST SEQUEL EVER:
That's a tough question to answer. I think I'm going to have to go with The Demon's Covenant by Sarah Rees Brennan (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sarahtales on LJ), simply because it's told from a completely different point of view, and somehow manages to make the world richer, the stakes higher, the confusion greater and challenge everything you thought you understood after finishing the book that preceded it. (The third book in the trilogy has a similar effect.)
CURRENTLY READING:
I'm currently reading The Drowning City by Amanda Downham, but it's really quite tedious. The worldbuilding is appalling, the characters are bland and the story makes no impact. I picked it and its sequel up on a whim from the municipal library last week, and I think maybe five years ago I would've had more patience for it. But now I can see all the cracks. It commits, in my opinion, one of the cardinal errors of worldbuilding: having a fantasy world of different, broadly-sketched cities/regions which seem to have no connections or influence on one another's culture - and yet everyone speaks the same language! Ugh. I may or may not continue with this series.
DRINK OF CHOICE WHILE READING:
Most of the time, I just drink glass after glass of tap water, so I'm sure that's what I'm normally drinking while reading. But if I had my way, it would always be (properly made) coffee, and I would be reading in a cafe.
E-READER OR PHYSICAL BOOK?
Both have their benefits. I don't like clutter, and you can get a lot of out-of-copyright books as e-books for free, so e-readers are more convenient in this regard. But the way I read involves lots of marking pages for quotes I want to come back to - either to write down in my quotes book or refer to in reviews - and I also like to flip back and forth through books (to read back over sections which foreshadowed later events, for example), so physical books are much more conducive to this kind of reading. I'm not overly precious about THE ROMANCE/SMELL/BEAUTY OF PHYSICAL BOOKS, but e-readers don't really suit my style of reading.
FICTIONAL CHARACTER YOU PROBABLY WOULD HAVE ACTUALLY DATED IN HIGH SCHOOL:
Oh, forever and ever Pagan Kidrouk from Catherine Jinks' Pagan Chronicles series. I'm pretty vocal about the fact that I've had an epic crush on him since I was ten years old (I'm pretty faithful in loves both real and fictional, that's for sure), and he has all the characteristics that I would've found deeply appealing as a teenager: intelligent and bookish, shy in real life but with a hilarious, snarky, angry commentary secretly running though his head, angsty as hell, and deeply caring about those he considers friends. Swoon.
GLAD YOU GAVE THIS BOOK A CHANCE:
This is kind of a ridiculous story, and I'm sure I've told it more than once, but Northern Lights/The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. It was given to me as a gift for my thirteenth birthday, along with a whole bunch of other birthday and Christmas books. The edition I was given had this cover, which I found spectacularly unappealling. I was away down the south coast with my dad and sister Miriam for a week after Christmas, and had brought about ten books, including that one. I slowly read through all the others, and then started whining that I had nothing to read. Miriam picked up The Golden Compass and said, 'you haven't read that one, have you?' I was deeply unenthusiastic. 'I HATE books about animals,' I said. However, out of desperation, I began to read. From the first page, I was hooked. I gulped it down, furiously. I did nothing but read. (It helped that that week it rained almost every day and was freezing, despite it being December in Australia.) And when I finished it, I opened it at the beginning and read it through again. Twice.
The rest of the series hadn't been published yet, but it would go on to shape my reading tastes for the rest of my teenage years and beyond. It got me my reviewing job. It, indirectly, was the cause of my decision to go to Cambridge and pursue a postgraduate degree. It introduced me to bridgetothestars.net and the #btts IRC chatroom and some of the most wonderful people I've ever met. It enabled me to travel the world - from Canberra to Southampton to Cardiff, from Dublin to Helsinki to Cambridge in the US - and always have someone to have coffee with, drink and dance with until 4am, and even, on occasion, a couch or spare bed to crash on. That book introduced me tobethankyou, the greatest friend I will ever have, a fourth younger sister in everything but blood.
I cannot put into words how grateful I am to that book, and to my sister for being irritated with me enough to force me to read it. (I still hate 'books about animals'.)
HIDDEN GEM BOOK:
I think perhaps The Girls in the Velvet Frame by Adele Geras. I read and reread it hundreds of times as a child without ever being able to articulate at the time why I loved it. But I can see now that it inspired a lifetime of loving the stories of women and girls - of mothers and daughters - who did nothing more than live life bravely in the spaces they were able to carve out for themselves. Their lives - an impoverished Jewish widow and her five daughters, growing up in British Mandate Palestine in the 1910s, feeding rabbits, working in a bakery, eating sugared almonds at their aunt's house, writing sentimental poetry - seem so small and quiet and insignificant, but I think the fact that Geras gave them dignity, power and significance had a profound effect on me, and on the stories I want to be told.
IMPORTANT MOMENT IN YOUR READING LIFE:
If I hadn't told it already, it would have been the day my sister nagged me into reading Northern Lights, but instead I'll mention the time I read Galax-Arena by Gillian Rubinstein. I found myself profoundly uninterested in the perspective of the narrator, Joella, and instead desperate to hear more from Presh and Allyman, the story's tertiary and secondary antagonists. I found them so intriguing that I wrote a whole future for them, which I fleshed out over the next five years. It was not the first time I'd done such a thing, but it was the first time I'd been so overwhelmed by the villains of a story, or, indeed, anyone who wasn't the narrator or point-of-view character. I can still remember thinking, 'I am only seeing these characters as Joella sees them, and how they are may be quite different'. I was ten years old, and it was the first time I understood narratorial bias and subjectivity.
JUST FINISHED:
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. Brilliant. Read it.
KINDS OF BOOKS YOU WON’T READ:
Self-help books. Most airport novel-style thrillers. 'True crime' books, unless they're about crimes that happened long enough ago that no one affected by them is still alive. Same goes for that genre of sensationalistic biographies about children who survived abusive childhoods.
LONGEST BOOK YOU’VE READ:
I haven't actually counted, but unless you include multi-volume nineteenth-century academic works, probably Europe by Norman Davies. I haven't read it since I was about eighteen, so I can't remember how well it stands up in terms of scholarship, but at the time it seemed like a solid work of popular history that also told an engaging story.
MAJOR BOOK HANGOVER BECAUSE OF:
At the moment I have a TV hangover because I can't get Pretty Little Liars out of my mind. I think the last book to linger obsessively in my mind was probably Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay.
NUMBER OF BOOKCASES YOU OWN:
Most of my books are back in Australia, where I have three bookcases of my own and share two with my mother and sister. (My bedroom in our flat was originally the study, and had a lot of wall-mounted bookshelves.) Here in Cambridge I share four bookcases with Matthias, but only four shelves are occupied with my academic and 'fun' books. The rest are his.
ONE BOOK YOU HAVE READ MULTIPLE TIMES:
Almost every book I like I've reread at least once, but why don't we go with The Tiger in the Well, the third book in Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart Mysteries series. It's my favourite in the series, so I've probably read it about twice as many times as the other three books, and it did a lot to articulate and shape my own political beliefs and thinking. Dan Goldberg's speech at the end of the book to an angry mob ('I ask you, who sacrificed your children?') is one of my favourite pieces of writing, and so politically astute and perceptive.
PREFERRED PLACE TO READ:
As a child, I used to read up trees a lot, but these days, I like reading in cafes due to easy access to coffee. It gets awkward, though, as I tend to laugh out loud, shout at characters and cry my eyes out when books are particularly affecting. In terms of comfort, nothing will beat my favourite reading site from when I lived in Narrabundah (aged 11-18): curled up on my mum's wing chair, my feet resting on the magazine rack on our coffee table, up against the window looking out to the garden. Nothing has ever been as comfortable.
QUOTE THAT INSPIRES YOU/GIVES YOU ALL THE FEELS FROM A BOOK YOU’VE READ:
'People who read are always a little like you. You can't just tell them, you have to tell them why.' - Lord Roland to Pagan Kidrouk, in Pagan's Crusade by Catherine Jinks.
'We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us, there is no elsewhere.' - The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.
In different ways, words that struck me in my soul, words I've lived by. Oh, my heart.
READING REGRET:
None, really. I regret buying a lot of books, though.
SERIES YOU STARTED AND NEED TO FINISH(ALL BOOKS ARE OUT IN SERIES):
Kate Elliott's Spiritwalker trilogy. I've read the first two books, and the third is out, but I'm waiting until I have more money in October to buy it.
THREE OF YOUR ALL-TIME FAVORITE BOOKS:
I'll leave out books that I've already mentioned above, but count most of them among my all-time favourites:
1. The Beast of Heaven by Victor Kelleher.
2. Shinkei by Gillian Rubinstein. (This is the third in a trilogy, but I like it the best.)
3. Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden.
All three are extremely important to me in different ways.
UNAPOLOGETIC FANGIRL FOR:
sophiamcdougall's Romanitas trilogy. I made an LJ comm for them, a fanblog, am a co-mod on a Facebook page about them, and generally go around the internet wailing that no one else has read them or wants to talk to me about them. I should probably pitch them on ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandom_of_one or something.
VERY EXCITED FOR THIS RELEASE MORE THAN ALL THE OTHERS:
Right now? Probably Untold, the second book in Sarah Rees Brennan's Lynburn Legacy trilogy.
WORST BOOKISH HABIT:
Bouncing around hysterically online trying to get people to talk to me about stuff I adore, usually with little success. (I used to bounce around hysterically talking at my mother about the plot, themes, tropes and subversive elements of books I adored, so I guess this is something of a step up in that people can now just ignore me.)
X MARKS THE SPOT: START AT THE TOP LEFT OF YOUR SHELF AND PICK THE 27TH BOOK:
This is difficult as I have so few books here in the UK, and they're all scattered about four different bookshelves. But if I progress from one side of the room to the other, I end up with:
The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, eds.
YOUR LATEST BOOK PURCHASE:
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes.
ZZZ-SNATCHER BOOK (LAST BOOK THAT KEPT YOU UP WAY LATE):
Again, Zoo City
AUTHOR YOU’VE READ THE MOST BOOKS FROM:
I've never actually bothered to count, but it's probably one of the prolific Australian children's/YA writers of my childhood. I think I've read everything Robin Klein ever wrote - Hating Alison Ashley was such a favourite of mine for about two years that I could quote it from memory - and the same goes for Jackie French. John Marsden, Gillian Rubinstein and Victor Kelleher probably come in a close second. I've really cooled on French over the past few years, mainly because the books of hers I had to review for the paper had flaws I couldn't overlook, but the works of the others all still stand the test of time. (And I can't be too mad at French, because I sent her a letter and a copy of a picture book I made when I was 10, and she wrote an incredibly detailed letter back to me and signed my copy of Rainstones...)
Actually, now that I think about it, I probably read the most books by Ann M. Martin, Francine Pascal or one of those other formulaic authors of the late '80s and early '90s.
BEST SEQUEL EVER:
That's a tough question to answer. I think I'm going to have to go with The Demon's Covenant by Sarah Rees Brennan (
sarahtales on LJ), simply because it's told from a completely different point of view, and somehow manages to make the world richer, the stakes higher, the confusion greater and challenge everything you thought you understood after finishing the book that preceded it. (The third book in the trilogy has a similar effect.)CURRENTLY READING:
I'm currently reading The Drowning City by Amanda Downham, but it's really quite tedious. The worldbuilding is appalling, the characters are bland and the story makes no impact. I picked it and its sequel up on a whim from the municipal library last week, and I think maybe five years ago I would've had more patience for it. But now I can see all the cracks. It commits, in my opinion, one of the cardinal errors of worldbuilding: having a fantasy world of different, broadly-sketched cities/regions which seem to have no connections or influence on one another's culture - and yet everyone speaks the same language! Ugh. I may or may not continue with this series.
DRINK OF CHOICE WHILE READING:
Most of the time, I just drink glass after glass of tap water, so I'm sure that's what I'm normally drinking while reading. But if I had my way, it would always be (properly made) coffee, and I would be reading in a cafe.
E-READER OR PHYSICAL BOOK?
Both have their benefits. I don't like clutter, and you can get a lot of out-of-copyright books as e-books for free, so e-readers are more convenient in this regard. But the way I read involves lots of marking pages for quotes I want to come back to - either to write down in my quotes book or refer to in reviews - and I also like to flip back and forth through books (to read back over sections which foreshadowed later events, for example), so physical books are much more conducive to this kind of reading. I'm not overly precious about THE ROMANCE/SMELL/BEAUTY OF PHYSICAL BOOKS, but e-readers don't really suit my style of reading.
FICTIONAL CHARACTER YOU PROBABLY WOULD HAVE ACTUALLY DATED IN HIGH SCHOOL:
Oh, forever and ever Pagan Kidrouk from Catherine Jinks' Pagan Chronicles series. I'm pretty vocal about the fact that I've had an epic crush on him since I was ten years old (I'm pretty faithful in loves both real and fictional, that's for sure), and he has all the characteristics that I would've found deeply appealing as a teenager: intelligent and bookish, shy in real life but with a hilarious, snarky, angry commentary secretly running though his head, angsty as hell, and deeply caring about those he considers friends. Swoon.
GLAD YOU GAVE THIS BOOK A CHANCE:
This is kind of a ridiculous story, and I'm sure I've told it more than once, but Northern Lights/The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. It was given to me as a gift for my thirteenth birthday, along with a whole bunch of other birthday and Christmas books. The edition I was given had this cover, which I found spectacularly unappealling. I was away down the south coast with my dad and sister Miriam for a week after Christmas, and had brought about ten books, including that one. I slowly read through all the others, and then started whining that I had nothing to read. Miriam picked up The Golden Compass and said, 'you haven't read that one, have you?' I was deeply unenthusiastic. 'I HATE books about animals,' I said. However, out of desperation, I began to read. From the first page, I was hooked. I gulped it down, furiously. I did nothing but read. (It helped that that week it rained almost every day and was freezing, despite it being December in Australia.) And when I finished it, I opened it at the beginning and read it through again. Twice.
The rest of the series hadn't been published yet, but it would go on to shape my reading tastes for the rest of my teenage years and beyond. It got me my reviewing job. It, indirectly, was the cause of my decision to go to Cambridge and pursue a postgraduate degree. It introduced me to bridgetothestars.net and the #btts IRC chatroom and some of the most wonderful people I've ever met. It enabled me to travel the world - from Canberra to Southampton to Cardiff, from Dublin to Helsinki to Cambridge in the US - and always have someone to have coffee with, drink and dance with until 4am, and even, on occasion, a couch or spare bed to crash on. That book introduced me to
bethankyou, the greatest friend I will ever have, a fourth younger sister in everything but blood. I cannot put into words how grateful I am to that book, and to my sister for being irritated with me enough to force me to read it. (I still hate 'books about animals'.)
HIDDEN GEM BOOK:
I think perhaps The Girls in the Velvet Frame by Adele Geras. I read and reread it hundreds of times as a child without ever being able to articulate at the time why I loved it. But I can see now that it inspired a lifetime of loving the stories of women and girls - of mothers and daughters - who did nothing more than live life bravely in the spaces they were able to carve out for themselves. Their lives - an impoverished Jewish widow and her five daughters, growing up in British Mandate Palestine in the 1910s, feeding rabbits, working in a bakery, eating sugared almonds at their aunt's house, writing sentimental poetry - seem so small and quiet and insignificant, but I think the fact that Geras gave them dignity, power and significance had a profound effect on me, and on the stories I want to be told.
IMPORTANT MOMENT IN YOUR READING LIFE:
If I hadn't told it already, it would have been the day my sister nagged me into reading Northern Lights, but instead I'll mention the time I read Galax-Arena by Gillian Rubinstein. I found myself profoundly uninterested in the perspective of the narrator, Joella, and instead desperate to hear more from Presh and Allyman, the story's tertiary and secondary antagonists. I found them so intriguing that I wrote a whole future for them, which I fleshed out over the next five years. It was not the first time I'd done such a thing, but it was the first time I'd been so overwhelmed by the villains of a story, or, indeed, anyone who wasn't the narrator or point-of-view character. I can still remember thinking, 'I am only seeing these characters as Joella sees them, and how they are may be quite different'. I was ten years old, and it was the first time I understood narratorial bias and subjectivity.
JUST FINISHED:
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. Brilliant. Read it.
KINDS OF BOOKS YOU WON’T READ:
Self-help books. Most airport novel-style thrillers. 'True crime' books, unless they're about crimes that happened long enough ago that no one affected by them is still alive. Same goes for that genre of sensationalistic biographies about children who survived abusive childhoods.
LONGEST BOOK YOU’VE READ:
I haven't actually counted, but unless you include multi-volume nineteenth-century academic works, probably Europe by Norman Davies. I haven't read it since I was about eighteen, so I can't remember how well it stands up in terms of scholarship, but at the time it seemed like a solid work of popular history that also told an engaging story.
MAJOR BOOK HANGOVER BECAUSE OF:
At the moment I have a TV hangover because I can't get Pretty Little Liars out of my mind. I think the last book to linger obsessively in my mind was probably Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay.
NUMBER OF BOOKCASES YOU OWN:
Most of my books are back in Australia, where I have three bookcases of my own and share two with my mother and sister. (My bedroom in our flat was originally the study, and had a lot of wall-mounted bookshelves.) Here in Cambridge I share four bookcases with Matthias, but only four shelves are occupied with my academic and 'fun' books. The rest are his.
ONE BOOK YOU HAVE READ MULTIPLE TIMES:
Almost every book I like I've reread at least once, but why don't we go with The Tiger in the Well, the third book in Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart Mysteries series. It's my favourite in the series, so I've probably read it about twice as many times as the other three books, and it did a lot to articulate and shape my own political beliefs and thinking. Dan Goldberg's speech at the end of the book to an angry mob ('I ask you, who sacrificed your children?') is one of my favourite pieces of writing, and so politically astute and perceptive.
PREFERRED PLACE TO READ:
As a child, I used to read up trees a lot, but these days, I like reading in cafes due to easy access to coffee. It gets awkward, though, as I tend to laugh out loud, shout at characters and cry my eyes out when books are particularly affecting. In terms of comfort, nothing will beat my favourite reading site from when I lived in Narrabundah (aged 11-18): curled up on my mum's wing chair, my feet resting on the magazine rack on our coffee table, up against the window looking out to the garden. Nothing has ever been as comfortable.
QUOTE THAT INSPIRES YOU/GIVES YOU ALL THE FEELS FROM A BOOK YOU’VE READ:
'People who read are always a little like you. You can't just tell them, you have to tell them why.' - Lord Roland to Pagan Kidrouk, in Pagan's Crusade by Catherine Jinks.
'We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us, there is no elsewhere.' - The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.
In different ways, words that struck me in my soul, words I've lived by. Oh, my heart.
READING REGRET:
None, really. I regret buying a lot of books, though.
SERIES YOU STARTED AND NEED TO FINISH(ALL BOOKS ARE OUT IN SERIES):
Kate Elliott's Spiritwalker trilogy. I've read the first two books, and the third is out, but I'm waiting until I have more money in October to buy it.
THREE OF YOUR ALL-TIME FAVORITE BOOKS:
I'll leave out books that I've already mentioned above, but count most of them among my all-time favourites:
1. The Beast of Heaven by Victor Kelleher.
2. Shinkei by Gillian Rubinstein. (This is the third in a trilogy, but I like it the best.)
3. Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden.
All three are extremely important to me in different ways.
UNAPOLOGETIC FANGIRL FOR:
sophiamcdougall's Romanitas trilogy. I made an LJ comm for them, a fanblog, am a co-mod on a Facebook page about them, and generally go around the internet wailing that no one else has read them or wants to talk to me about them. I should probably pitch them on fandom_of_one or something. VERY EXCITED FOR THIS RELEASE MORE THAN ALL THE OTHERS:
Right now? Probably Untold, the second book in Sarah Rees Brennan's Lynburn Legacy trilogy.
WORST BOOKISH HABIT:
Bouncing around hysterically online trying to get people to talk to me about stuff I adore, usually with little success. (I used to bounce around hysterically talking at my mother about the plot, themes, tropes and subversive elements of books I adored, so I guess this is something of a step up in that people can now just ignore me.)
X MARKS THE SPOT: START AT THE TOP LEFT OF YOUR SHELF AND PICK THE 27TH BOOK:
This is difficult as I have so few books here in the UK, and they're all scattered about four different bookshelves. But if I progress from one side of the room to the other, I end up with:
The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, eds.
YOUR LATEST BOOK PURCHASE:
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes.
ZZZ-SNATCHER BOOK (LAST BOOK THAT KEPT YOU UP WAY LATE):
Again, Zoo City