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It rained last night, enough to break the crushing heat and humidity, at least until a couple of hours ago. It's back to Stickyville, I'm afeared.
If I had to answer the "Which books would you take with you to a deserted island?" question, I'm not sure what I'd answer. The Lord of the Rings, obviously, would be in there, and I'd probably also choose Good Omens (for sheer fun, thoughtfulness and rereadability, it's tough to beat). Apart from that, I'm not sure. As far back as I can remember, I've loved books and they've always been a big part of my life. My father once remarked that me being lost in a book was the equivalent of someone else curling up in the fetal position. Heh. Still, it's hard to list which books I couldn't do without, because there are some books that were very important to me, when I read them for the first time, that I'm no longer interested in revisiting. Other books provided such a very vivid reading experience that anything short of the first time fails to measure up. Some books are on my mental "must read again someday" but I've not yet gotten around to it, perhaps because I don't want to be disappointed; other times I've been pleasantly suprised that the books held up better the second (and third, and...) time than I'd thought they would.
Sometimes I can't remember exactly where or exactly when I read a book I really liked and I feel odd about it. After all, shouldn't the experience include not only the book itself, but the whole setting? I remember quite clearly reading Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan during a trip to Vancouver, staying up until 2 in the morning in my aunt and uncle's living room, their wall clock ticking loudly in the silence as I tried to hurry and finish just one more chapter so I could put the book down and get to sleep. That would have been in 1997 and I was just shy of turning sixteen.
Actually, it took me a minute to figure out the year, because we stayed with that aunt and uncle twice, first in 1994, then again in 1997. But in 1994, I was twelve years old, neck-deep in Dragonlance books and slept in their guest bedroom. Also, I'm fairly certain I read The Fionavar Tapestry before I read The Lions of Al-Rassan, and I read Fionavar, which M-P had lent me, during the summer holidays, which would have been impossible before our trip in July of 1994 (after secondary 2), and the year before that, M-P didn't read in English much yet.
Speaking of Dragonlance, I must say in my defense that I never pretended they were anything more than fun, fast-paced, sometimes touching books and, most importantly, much better than The Wheel of Time. I did invest a lot in them, though. I have fond memories of spending hours on the phone with M-P, discussing our favourite characters and reading out loud from the books, acting out the parts, especially from the Legends trilogy. I was Tasselhoff (of course!) and M-P was Raistlin (duh!) and I guess we traded off with Caramon and Tanis ("Fine, I'll be Tanis this time, even though he's boring!"), though I seem to remember M-P having it bad for Dalamar. :D~
There's one book that a very great impact on me but that I'm a bit embarrassed to talk about, because I know it's badly-written, is Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. In another moment of memory loss, I can't remember if I read it when I was eleven or twelve. Eleven, I think, but I do remember that it was a birthday present I'd requested, and that we bought it at Book Market, so that would have been right before I started secondary 1. A friend of my mother's made a comment about how I was maybe a little young, but my parents' philosophy on that was always that if we were too young, we'd get bored and go read something else. After all, the first time my father started reading me Anne of Green Gables, we never got past the first chapter or so; a year later, I was ready. Anyway, up until The Mist of Avalon I'd been reading lots of children's fantasy, but nothing had impressed me so much Tolkien had, and it had never crossed my mind that the gender balance in LotR was horrible skewed. TMoA gave me powerful female characters and a powerful sense of feminine magic right when I was about to start becoming a woman myself. Sure, some things went over my head (I didn't realise at first that Morgaine and Raven were having sex when they meet again after all those years, for instance, as the language was abstract enough to make it sound to me like they were... kissing? hugging? performing some sort of sacred dance?) and when I returned to it a few years later I cringed at the bad writing, but it did stir up the budding feminist within me, as well as begin to cement my views about Christianity. And lest you think I had no views on the subject before, know that my mother is an ex-Catholic and I grew up listening to her occasional rants about confession, baptism, guilt and "those damn priests telling little children that everything is a sin".
And something I finished just last night:
The Distance Between Us (Maggie O'Farrell): This is a love story, but at least it's got other interesting psychological elements, and also a male lead who struck me as quite believable, and I was glad how the relationship between the sisters turned out to be much more balanced than it seemed to be at first. I will praise this book by saying that even though most of it takes place in Scotland, the bits in Hong Kong really whet my appetite and made me even more intrigued about that place -- for some reason, they seemed much more vivid than the parts in Scotland, though that could just be a reflection of local geography, what with Scotland often being grey and misty and all, even when it was described as sunny. But that might just be my own preconceived notions. :)
If I had to answer the "Which books would you take with you to a deserted island?" question, I'm not sure what I'd answer. The Lord of the Rings, obviously, would be in there, and I'd probably also choose Good Omens (for sheer fun, thoughtfulness and rereadability, it's tough to beat). Apart from that, I'm not sure. As far back as I can remember, I've loved books and they've always been a big part of my life. My father once remarked that me being lost in a book was the equivalent of someone else curling up in the fetal position. Heh. Still, it's hard to list which books I couldn't do without, because there are some books that were very important to me, when I read them for the first time, that I'm no longer interested in revisiting. Other books provided such a very vivid reading experience that anything short of the first time fails to measure up. Some books are on my mental "must read again someday" but I've not yet gotten around to it, perhaps because I don't want to be disappointed; other times I've been pleasantly suprised that the books held up better the second (and third, and...) time than I'd thought they would.
Sometimes I can't remember exactly where or exactly when I read a book I really liked and I feel odd about it. After all, shouldn't the experience include not only the book itself, but the whole setting? I remember quite clearly reading Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan during a trip to Vancouver, staying up until 2 in the morning in my aunt and uncle's living room, their wall clock ticking loudly in the silence as I tried to hurry and finish just one more chapter so I could put the book down and get to sleep. That would have been in 1997 and I was just shy of turning sixteen.
Actually, it took me a minute to figure out the year, because we stayed with that aunt and uncle twice, first in 1994, then again in 1997. But in 1994, I was twelve years old, neck-deep in Dragonlance books and slept in their guest bedroom. Also, I'm fairly certain I read The Fionavar Tapestry before I read The Lions of Al-Rassan, and I read Fionavar, which M-P had lent me, during the summer holidays, which would have been impossible before our trip in July of 1994 (after secondary 2), and the year before that, M-P didn't read in English much yet.
Speaking of Dragonlance, I must say in my defense that I never pretended they were anything more than fun, fast-paced, sometimes touching books and, most importantly, much better than The Wheel of Time. I did invest a lot in them, though. I have fond memories of spending hours on the phone with M-P, discussing our favourite characters and reading out loud from the books, acting out the parts, especially from the Legends trilogy. I was Tasselhoff (of course!) and M-P was Raistlin (duh!) and I guess we traded off with Caramon and Tanis ("Fine, I'll be Tanis this time, even though he's boring!"), though I seem to remember M-P having it bad for Dalamar. :D~
There's one book that a very great impact on me but that I'm a bit embarrassed to talk about, because I know it's badly-written, is Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. In another moment of memory loss, I can't remember if I read it when I was eleven or twelve. Eleven, I think, but I do remember that it was a birthday present I'd requested, and that we bought it at Book Market, so that would have been right before I started secondary 1. A friend of my mother's made a comment about how I was maybe a little young, but my parents' philosophy on that was always that if we were too young, we'd get bored and go read something else. After all, the first time my father started reading me Anne of Green Gables, we never got past the first chapter or so; a year later, I was ready. Anyway, up until The Mist of Avalon I'd been reading lots of children's fantasy, but nothing had impressed me so much Tolkien had, and it had never crossed my mind that the gender balance in LotR was horrible skewed. TMoA gave me powerful female characters and a powerful sense of feminine magic right when I was about to start becoming a woman myself. Sure, some things went over my head (I didn't realise at first that Morgaine and Raven were having sex when they meet again after all those years, for instance, as the language was abstract enough to make it sound to me like they were... kissing? hugging? performing some sort of sacred dance?) and when I returned to it a few years later I cringed at the bad writing, but it did stir up the budding feminist within me, as well as begin to cement my views about Christianity. And lest you think I had no views on the subject before, know that my mother is an ex-Catholic and I grew up listening to her occasional rants about confession, baptism, guilt and "those damn priests telling little children that everything is a sin".
And something I finished just last night:
The Distance Between Us (Maggie O'Farrell): This is a love story, but at least it's got other interesting psychological elements, and also a male lead who struck me as quite believable, and I was glad how the relationship between the sisters turned out to be much more balanced than it seemed to be at first. I will praise this book by saying that even though most of it takes place in Scotland, the bits in Hong Kong really whet my appetite and made me even more intrigued about that place -- for some reason, they seemed much more vivid than the parts in Scotland, though that could just be a reflection of local geography, what with Scotland often being grey and misty and all, even when it was described as sunny. But that might just be my own preconceived notions. :)