books. everyone loves books.

[fahye]

Alright, so we're playing the 15-books-I-would-take-away-to-college (or get stuck with on a desert island, whatever) game. This is an interesting exercise, because this isn't my 15 favourite books. (I love Good Omens to pieces but know it back to front by now.) My list reflects the books I'd read again and again and again and again, mostly because they have had - and are still having - a great impact on me and my style, and because reading any of these invariably makes me feel like writing. That's something precious.

Comment with your own list? I'm curious. And always on the lookout for new things, despite my staggeringly long existing to-read list.



Julian Barnes: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
Robert Dessaix: (and so forth)
Jostein Gaarder: Sophie's World
Neil Gaiman: American Gods, Smoke & Mirrors
Peter Hoeg: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
Elizabeth Knox: The Vintner's Luck
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club
Terry Pratchett: Night Watch
Tom Robbins: Skinny Legs And All
William Shakespeare: The complete works. Shut up, it's a single volume, it counts as one. I will fight anyone who claims otherwise.
Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
John Varley: The Golden Globe
Jeanette Winterson: Art & Lies
Diana Wynne Jones: Howl's Moving Castle

Comments

[schiarire.livejournal.com]

HOHOHO TYPO QUEEN!

It's interesting to me, too! Even when we put the same authors (rarely . . . ) we didn't come up with the same books. My reasoning in re: Dessaix is that I adooored Corfu like a long, hazy summer. It made me want to go to Greece and, I don't know, do warm things. Actually, I associate this same warm feeling with much of This Side of Paradise.

Twilight of Love is wonderful to me. It sort of minces around in that very Dessaix-y way, mince mince mince OH LOOK I ARE A CLEVER BOY!!1 JA! mince, but all of a sudden you're in Soviet Russia and there are guns going off in the street and everything is coming down around your head and, and, it's also about friendship, which is quaint but also quintessential. Ja?

(and so forth), on the other hand, I never managed to finish. Dessaix's self-consciousness, like John Gardner's, is a real block for me.


Poets I would like on hand include Hilda Conkling (http://www.fullbooks.com/Poems-By-a-Little-Girl.html), whose work I don't even OWN, Stephane Mallarmé, the Penguin Book of French Poetry 1820-1950 (ANTHOLOGIES COUNT), & Coleridge.