books meme

[snick_backup]

Reposted from Tumblr.

Rules: In a text post, list ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard — they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you.

This list is going to largely consist of "Books I read at an impressionable age that have had lasting effects on my mental landscape." All aboard the nostalgia train!

1. The Little White Horse - Elizabeth Gouge (because hares are more noble than rabbits)


2. The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm - Nancy Farmer (between this and House of the Scorpion, Farmer is one of the weirdest and most underappreciated YA authors of the 90s)


3. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (one of my single most favorite books ever ever ever)


4. Anne of the Island - L.M. Montgomery (or really everything by Montgomery, but Anne's games of imagination with Davy particularly resonated)


5. The Wind in the Door - Madeleine L'Engle (I was so disappointed to find out what mitochondria were actually like. So disappointed)


6. The Harper Hall Trilogy - Anne McCaffrey (FORMATIVE. INFLUENCE.)


7. My Side of the Mountain - Jean Craighead George (wilderness survival narratives - never over them)


8. The Goats - Brock Cole (such an odd man out on this list - boy and girl on the cusp of puberty get bullied at summer camp and run away together for several days, stealing food and hiding out and bedsharing - but it's stuck with me all this time after only that one read)


9. The Alfred Hitchcock series of children's horror anthologies (so much weird there for a young mind just starving for weird)


10. Weirdos of the Universe Unite - Pamela Sargent (where I was introduced to several mythological / folklore figures, for one thing, like Baba Yaga and the Horned King. A profoundly weird and silly book.)

The main themes here seem to be: female authors, SFF in some way. Shocking, I know. From when I could read, the weird was always what I wanted.

Other key influences that didn't make this list: Dr. Seuss (again, as weird as possible: On Beyond Z, Oh the Places You'll Go...), Chris Van Allsburg, Bruce Coville because I couldn't choose just one, Alexander Key with some inescapably 60s-flavored children's fantasy alongside his relatively respectable Escape to Witch Mountain, The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts, and on and on.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ( DW replies)

Comments

[snickfic]

I recommend it! It is a very weird book about two children getting kidnapped in a near-future African nation (I forget which one) and being pursued by a trio of detectives to whom a nuclear accident gave special powers. Which is to say, it's like nothing else I've ever read.