coffeeandink: Favoritism

Micole (

coffeeandink) wrote,
@ 2003-12-03 22:00:00

Favoritism
Chad Orzel talks about different criteria for lists of favorite books;

kate_nepveu provides commentary and her own list. Or one of them, anyway.

My version, more or less, is here. Two years on, I wouldn't change anything. It may be worth noting that only two of the books listed postdate college for me (and probably not the ones you'd guess), and only six more postdate high school. (By this I mean the date I read them, not the date of publication.)

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kate_nepveu
2003-12-04 06:55 am UTC (link)

Interesting--desert island is an entirely different category for me, and *much* harder to do. I may try later.

I got curious about recency and ordered my list, which splits fairly evenly across my educational career:

Possession: when it won a Booker, which puts it at, whoosh, very early high school, probably too early, really
The Lady's Not for Burning: high school
Pride and Prejudice: high school
The Innkeeper's Song: high school
Gaudy Night: high school, but not rediscovered until law school
Sandman: college
Bridge of Birds: college
Last Call: college
Freedom and Necessity: college
Good Omens: college?
Deep Secret: college?
The Sarantine Mosaic, Guy Gavriel Kay: college and law school
When the King Comes Home: law school
Spindle's End: law school
Look to Windward: law school
The Last Hot Time: law school
Element of Fire: law school

(High school ends 1994, college 1999, law school 2002.)

I think this is because, not to put too fine a point on it, I read a lot of crap when I was younger. And my reading pace has gone way down since I graduated.

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coffeeandink
2003-12-04 07:16 am UTC (link)

1 Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice - elementary school
2 Francesca Lia Block, Dangerous Angels - college (the latest ones in the collection may have gotten published after I graduated, but I'm counting this as college because that's when I started reading her)
3 Charlotte Bronte, Villette - college
4 Emma Bull, War for the Oaks - summer between junior high school & high school
5 Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess - elementary school
6 A.S. Byatt, Possession - high school
7 Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats - high school/college (the collection came out after I'd graduated college, but I started reading her in high school)
8 C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen - high school
9 John Crowley, Little, Big - either the end of high school or the beginning of college
10 Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills - college
11 Pamela Dean, Tam Lin - high school
12 Neil Gaiman, Sandman - college (the series was finished after I graduated, but I started reading it my first year)
13 Greer Ilene Gilman, Moonwise - end of high school or beginning of college
14 Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle - high school
15 Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees - college
16 Laura Kinsale, The Shadow & the Star - after graduation
17 John Le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - after graduation
18 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Niqht - high school
19 Patricia McKillip, Riddle-Master - elementary school
20 Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden - high school
21 Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night - college
22 William Shakespeare, Hamlet - high school
23 Tom Stoppard, Arcadia - college (was in London during its first run)
24 James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Warm Worlds & Otherwise - elementary school
25 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own - high school

Graduated high school in 1991 and college in 1995. My reading pace has gone way down since I graduated, too. I fear that I have grown inflexible and resistant with age and art isn't likely to touch me as deeply. *Buffy*, in fact, is the only work of art since, oh, 1997 that's gotten as near to my heart as any of the books mentioned (well, and *The X Files*; but that hasn't survived its last two years in the way *Buffy* has).

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kate_nepveu
2003-12-04 09:54 am UTC (link)

1 Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice - elementary school
--Goodness, what kind of an experience was that? Has your relationship to it changed radically or gradually over the years?

16 Laura Kinsale, The Shadow & the Star - after graduation
--This reminds me that I'll have to try her, thanks.

19 Patricia McKillip, Riddle-Master - elementary school
--OTOH, I might almost have liked this series if I'd read it then. I think I was in college when I did read it.

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coffeeandink
2003-12-04 10:02 am UTC (link)

1 Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice - elementary school
--Goodness, what kind of an experience was that? Has your relationship to it changed radically or gradually over the years?

I expect it's changed, but so gradually I can't tell how. I first read it when I was seven, and I'm sure I didn't get anything but the general plotline, but I remember as bubbling over with joy, and that's pretty much the way I still think of it.

The Tiptree, which I first read when I was nine or ten, has changed much more radically for me, but that was a library copy, so there was a long gap between readings. I had completely missed all of the irony, of course. This undoubtedly means I missed it in Austen, too.

Kinsale's plots tend to go haywire and The Shadow and the Star is no exception, but I do love the characterization.

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	kate_nepveu 2003-12-04 10:05 am UTC (link)
	Fair warning about Kinsale, thanks. (Reply to this)(Parent)

stakebait
2003-12-04 09:28 am UTC (link)

Best I can do on short notice...

Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers
The Last Unicorn, Peter Beagle
The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkein
War for the Oaks, Emma Bull
Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, Douglas Adams
Ursula Le Guin, The Beginning Place
Pamela Dean, Tam Lin
Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
China Meiville, Perdito Street Station
Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
The Merro Tree, Kaitie Waitman
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Till We Have Faces, CS Lewis
Venetia, Georgette Heyer
The Dark Is Rising series, Susan Cooper
The Miles Vorkosigan series, Lois McMasters Bujold
The Uplift series, David Brin
A Canticle for Leibowitz
A Home At the End of the World, by Michael Cunningham
Stealing the Elf King’s Roses, Diane Duane
A Paradigm of Earth, Candas Jane Dorsey

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kate_nepveu
2003-12-04 09:51 am UTC (link)

Are you using the desert-island definition of "favorite"?

*goes through the list*

The Last Unicorn--I should re-read this. The tone didn't work for me back in the day, which is probably why I liked _The Innkeeper's Song_ so much better.

Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay--yeah, I suspect a lot of people prefer this to the Sarantine Mosaic

Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
--not retroactively ruined by the sequel(s), huh? Good for you, I wish I could say the same

Venetia, Georgette Heyer--I've not read this one, nor heard of it, I think. What's it about?

Stealing the Elf King’s Roses, Diane Duane--this has been sitting unread on a shelf right near my bed staring accusatorily at me for ages now. I hope it's just that I've not been in the mood, and not that the legal weirdness of the first chapter put me off . . .

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	coffeeandink 2003-12-04 10:05 am UTC (link)
	The Last Unicorn was another one I read very young; I missed all the irony and most of humor. My favorite Kay is A Song for Arbonne, but there's something in all his books which I find emotionally distancing. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

kate_nepveu
2003-12-04 10:13 am UTC (link)

Re: Kay--that's interesting, because I think of _Arbonne_ as the coolest, emotionally, of his works. Which is not the same as distancing, of course, but seems to me to be related.

(My emotional intensity ranking of Kay, from least to most:

_Arbonne_
Sarantine Mosaic
_Tigana_
_Al-Rassan_
_Fionavar_, but sort of off to the side also because I have a hard time comparing it to his other works)

Does this perhaps tie into narrative voice that was being discussed recently?

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stakebait
2003-12-04 10:38 am UTC (link)

Yes, very much using the desert island definition of favorite -- which means things that get their emotional punch from novelty and strangeness, like much of cyberpunk, are way underrepresented, and so are dystopian social commentaries, absent a society to reform.

I adored the tone of TLU and found Innkeeper's Song a let down, I wonder if they're mutually exclusive books? I'm fond of other Beagle, especially A Fine and Private Place, but it doesn't resonate for me the same way. But then I have a major resignation fiction kink, and TLU is very much a book about the concept of what is "enough" to me.

Kay -- I loved Tigana most and then Arabonne. The Sarantine Mosaic and the Lions of Al-Rassan were too shadowed by the real history for me to take them as much on their own terms as I'd have liked, and Fionavar suffered for being part of the "not important in this world, very important in magic world" genre, which makes me jaded and impatient before I even start the preface.

not retroactively ruined by the sequel(s), huh? Good for you, I wish I could say the same

No, but then I liked the Sparrow's sequel. And some of the Ender ones -- Speaker for the Dead, to be precise, very much indeed. Xenocide not so much, and Children of the Mind did indeed dim my appreciation for Ender as a character somewhat, but not for the previous books. And the Shadow of the this, Shadow of the that books I'm treating as fanfic or the insider's guide to... fun supplemental material, but not expected to stand on their own.

Venetia is about a woman who has grown up past the usual age of coming out sequestered in the country, when she meets her neighbor, a notorious rake. The efforts of everyone to protect her from what she neither needs nor desires to be protected from form the bulk of the book. To me she's one of Heyer's most fully realized heroines.

The Duane isn't up to the Serious Standards of most of the others on the list, but its a comfort book for me that stands up to a lot of rereads, and hey, desert island.

Mer

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kate_nepveu
2003-12-04 11:04 am UTC (link)

I adored the tone of TLU and found Innkeeper's Song a let down, I wonder if they're mutually exclusive books?

This is entirely possible. If this were Usenet, someone would immediately pop up who adored both, but LiveJournal isn't as good at that kind of thing, alas. =>

_Venetia_ sounds lovely. I really need to catalogue my Heyer collection and make a list to carry in my wallet, much like I did when we were still looking for Nero Wolfe books.

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	stakebait 2003-12-04 11:10 am UTC (link)
	If this were Usenet, someone would immediately pop up who adored both, Heh. I was thinking that too. Mer (Reply to this)(Parent)

	coffeeandink 2003-12-04 10:08 am UTC (link)
	That is so much less kinky than I would have expected. That is, I would have expected you to have some titles I'd never even heard of, from places where our reading doesn't intersect, and instead you've only got seven books I haven't read, of which I own five (i.e., plan to read eventually). (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	stakebait 2003-12-04 10:27 am UTC (link)
	hee! Well there's a simple reason for that: I didn't make the list looking at my own shelves, I made it looking at your list, and Kate's. There are probably quite a few that ought to be on it that I just wasn't thinking of at the moment. (Reply to this)(Parent)

naomichana
2003-12-04 11:43 am UTC (link)

I agree that lists of favorite books verge on the impossible, and since my lists intersect only vaguely with the ones I'm seeing here (yes on Gaudy Night for sure; that's the one non-sacred text I make a point of taking along whenever I leave the English-speaking world).

Must think about this more when I have leisure to actually construct a list. And why are we mostly coming up with fiction, I wonder? My current favorite book -- the one I look forward to curling up with and reading over a chapter again -- is Rachel Adler's Engendering Judaism, but that may just be because I'm weird. ;)

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	kate_nepveu 2003-12-04 11:59 am UTC (link)
	And why are we mostly coming up with fiction, I wonder? I don't know about we, but for me, the answer is easy--it's virtually all I read for leisure. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	naomichana 2003-12-04 01:21 pm UTC (link)
	Well, that makes sense. My problem -- it's not a problem except in this connection -- is that there's a huge overlap between things I read for professional reasons and things I read purely for leisure. Most of the topics on which I am vitally interested I, er, manage to teach courses in. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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