Day 06 – Favorite book of your favorite series OR your favorite book of all time
I… cannot even answer this. Even a little. This meme was not designed for someone like me.
Look. I’m really not into book monogamy. You ask me a question like this and my mind just starts… spinning wildly, throwing out different options.
I’ll tell you what.
Recommend me a book that you think should become my favorite.
Day 05 – A book or series you hate
Aw man, book hate.
Generally, when I pick up a book and dislike it, I just put it back down. I’ve only ever flung one book, and it was a really awful romance novel complete with abusive, stalker-y male love interest and completely awful heroine. I don’t remember the author or the name of the book, or what exactly made me fling it. I think there may have been very insulting Irish accents, or some kind of accent, thrown in to the mix as well.
I dislike the Twilight books and other books that offer up very skewed relationships as the ideal. There are a LOT of books aimed at female audiences that present fucked up relationships as the norm. Lots of “romantic comedies” that do the same.
Ooooh, also I hate gratuitous rape/abuse of a female character. I mean, some women (and some men!) are raped and it affects their lives. However, I hate it when an author trowls on the bad stuff thickly… and usually tosses in some daddy issues as the cherry on the shit sundae. I mean, if the bad stuff is only there to be horribly bad… ugh. It’s emotionally manipulative.
Hm. This is less about specific books/serieses as it is about tropes.
Oh! Shit! I hate Terry Goodkind’s “Wizard’s First Rule” books. The first one wasn’t too bad, but pretty soon you get to the trope that women deserve to be raped because they’re just bitches and straight up DESERVE IT. They must have done SOMETHING to warrant it! And it’s not that bad because it’s SEX and they LIKE SEX. So they deserve it, and they enjoy it! Rape! It’s what’s for dinner! Also he really ripped off “The Wheel of Time,” to the point where I went and checked publication dates to see who jacked who. AMAZING.
Day 04 – Your favorite book or series ever
I don’t think I can answer this.
This is… not quite as traumatic or difficult as picking a favorite child or parent, but… hard. I mean, I keep thinking of both books and series and think “Oh, this one. Except for this one. But then there’s this one. Oh, no, wait there’s this one. But I can’t forget this one…” I read so much, and I love so much. So many books have hugely impacted my life. I don’t have just one I can point to and say “Yes, this. This one, forever.”
But I think I’m going to go with Lloyd Alexander’s “Westmark” trilogy and “Vesper Holly” series. Although his Prydain books were incredibly influential and loved as well, Tamora Pierce’s “Lioness Rampant” books were HUGE, Susan Cooper’s “Dark is Rising” books really shaped me and my writing, Roger Zelazny’s “9 Princes in Amber” books were and continue to be a humongous part of my life, Robyn McKinley’s Damar books have influenced me in so many ways, etc. And then, of course, there’s the Gentleman Bastard books, the Song of Ice and Fire, the Doctrine of Labyrinths, the Clockwork Century… So many. So many to love. So many to read and re-read. Gosh.
I really can’t pick just one.
It’s been like a million years since I last did an “Awesome Damn Comic of the Week” bit, so I really want to thank Garland Grey of Tiger Beat Down for bringing Riot Nrrd to light.
Oh.
My.
God.
I basically fell in love with this comic like 2 or 3 comics in. The art is pretty rough, but in an endearing and trying-hard way, and the writing is awesome. The cast is extremely diverse, including characters who are disabled, and it doesn’t feel in the least like tokenism or inclusion for the sake of inclusion. It very much feels like a group of people who are friends, and some of them are different in some ways and some of them are different in other ways.
And oh, the nerdity.
It’s beautiful.
There’s only 35 comics so far, so there’s not much to catch up on. I really hope RJ continues with this project. I’m very excited about it and adore the characters.
Some of my favorite comics so far are:
The Whedon Problem
Community Service
Mae Jemison is awesome
Blind Date pt 3
Day 03 – The best book you’ve read in the last 12 months
I really hate questions like this, because I’ve read several good books in the past 12 months and really can’t select one outstanding book from all of them. So instead, I’m going to go with the best book I’ve read in the past month that was published within the past 12 months.
And that book is Boneshaker (Sci Fi Essential Books)
This is a tightly written steam punk novel set shortly after the Klondike Gold Rush, in Seattle. Kind of. Priest takes some liberties with history, putting this world very AU even without the dirigibles and zombies and mechanical arms. There’s two POV characters, a teen aged boy and a middle aged woman (yay for more female protags). Priest also addresses one of the failings of Steam Punk as a genre, and has people who aren’t White as characters… characters who are affected by institutionalized racism. They aren’t main characters, at least in the book (there are others coming out, set in the same world) but they have lives and experiences that transcend the white protagonists, and stories of their own.
Day 02 – A book or series you wish more people were reading and talking about
I’m going to winnow this down to one, specific book that I wish more people were reading, although I have kind of a list going on.
In The Forest Of Forgetting
This is one of those books that I got, fell in love with, and then gave away my only copy of. It’s one of those books where I’ve recommended it to people, to the point of buying them copies of it. I’m currently without a copy of this book as I gave mine away to someone else to enjoy, but it’s absolutely a book worth buying and worth keeping and reading over and over again.
If a book series goes on too long I just kind of stop reading it. I think most people I know who’ve done this meme have mentioned The Wheel of Time books. I know that people I know who love the series are bothered by its length. I don’t have a real contender for this, though.
A series I wish that had gone on longer is Sarah Monette’s Doctrine of Labyrinths series, which is 4 books long and also has a short story set in that world in the anthology The Queen in Winter, and which may include a short story murder mystery featuring a minor character from the series, but that story hasn’t been written yet.
Doctrine of Labyrinths tells the story of two half brothers from very different backgrounds who meet as adults and discover that their backgrounds are pretty similar after all, in a number of ways. All sorts of stuff goes on in the series, including magic and a murder mystery that’s hundreds of years old as well as contemporary plots and politics and social engineering. The main thrust of the books, however, is the brothers each coming to terms with his past, his actions, and becoming human. Each, in his own way, considers himself a monster and in the final book… there’s a lot of peace making going on. Sarah Monette, like Lois McMaster Bujold and Scott Lynch, kind of follows the “what’s the worst thing I can do this character and have him survive?” school of writing. Lots of writers do that, and misery just piles up. Good writers do that and the characters change and evolve and eventually learn to deal with what’s happened and what they’ve become.
The final book, Corambis, ends on a hopeful note. There aren’t any real plot threads left hanging. But the world is so vast and interesting and the characters so interesting, the possibilities so present, that it’s easy to want to see more.
(I also really would like Scott Lynch and George R. R. Martin to get their next books out, but they’re working on them so I have to be content with that.)
There’s a book meme going around that I’m going to start doing tomorrow. Here are the questions if you would like to follow along.
Day 01 – A book series you wish had gone on longer OR a book series you wish would just freaking end already (or both!)
Day 02 – A book or series you wish more people were reading and talking about
Day 03 – The best book you’ve read in the last 12 months
Day 04 – Your favorite book or series ever
Day 05 – A book or series you hate
Day 06 – Favorite book of your favorite series OR your favorite book of all time
Day 07 – Least favorite plot device employed by way too many books you actually enjoyed otherwise
Day 08 – A book everyone should read at least once
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – A book or series of books you’ve watched more than five times
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book OR current favorite YA book (or both!)
Day 14 – Favorite character in a book (of any sex or gender)
Day 15 – Your “comfort” book
Day 16 – Favorite poem or collection of poetry
Day 17 – Favorite story or collection of stories (short stories, novellas, novelettes, etc.)
Day 18 – Favorite beginning scene in a book
Day 19 – Favorite book cover (bonus points for posting an image!)
Day 20 – Favorite kiss
Day 21 – Favorite romantic/sexual relationship (including asexual romantic relationships)
Day 22 – Favorite non-sexual relationship (including asexual romantic relationships)
Day 23 – Most annoying character ever
Day 24 – Best quote from a novel
Day 25 – Any five books from your “to be read” stack
Day 26 – OMG WTF? OR most irritating/awful/annoying book ending
Day 27 – If a book contains ______, you will always read it (and a book or books that contain it)!
Day 28 – First favorite book or series obsession
Day 29 – Saddest character death OR best/most satisfying character death (or both!)
Day 30 – What book are you reading right now?f
I took a walk today thinking that going out into the fresh air would be much cooler and nicer than staying in the apartment.
I was wrong.
It kind of felt like someone was following me around with a blow dryer or a very large panting dog or something. Hot, humid, blowing on me. Not pleasant.
I walked to the corner store and bought some ice cream sandwiches. Not the rectangular one with the squooshy not-quite-cookie chocolate encasing vanilla ice cream, although those are good. I wasn’t in the mood for squooshy almost-cookie, so I got some straight up cookies with ice cream in the middle.
Or what looked like straight up cookies with ice cream in the middle.
It’s more like sponge cake with ice cream in the middle.
They are all gooey and squishy and stick to my fingers and bluh. When I was a kid, I remember ice cream sandwiches where the cookies were actually cookies, kind of crisp, kind of thick, they were hard to eat because you’d bite down and the cookie pieces were hard to bite through and they’d squish together and the ice cream would ooze out the sides and it was just a mess. Tasted good, though.
I miss those ice cream cookie sandwiches. The ones in the freezer do not measure up.
I asked a friend of mine if she’d eaten those same kind of ice cream cookie sandwiches, and she said no. The only novelty ice cream she ate as a kid was dilly bars from Dairy Queen.
I have not had a dilly bar in at least fifteen years. Possibly twenty.
I don’t have decent ice cream cookie sandwiches and I don’t have a dilly bar. I’m also on my third shirt of the day because I’ve soaked two with sweat already. Life’s sooooo hard right now.
I’m doing passenger counts this weekend, and today we were on the South Chicago train. It was pretty uneventful in all. Our final trip inbound, there was a wedding party (bridge, groom, bridesmaids, I didn’t see any groomsmen but they were probably there) on the platform at 47th street, taking photos. We pulled in, people got off, people got on, the wedding party stayed there (you can rent CTA trains to drive you around the city, possibly with a bartender, but I don’t think Metra offers a deal like that).
As we pulled away, the engineer came on over the intercom.
“Who does that,” he said.
Everyone in the train started laughing.
“They said they wanted to be original.”
He paused, then spoke again.
“…at 47th street.”
It was a beautiful day for a wedding.
