i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

Today's Top 5 list comes to us from starfishchick, who answered my plea for a topic. It's been ages since we did a book related list, and her suggestion was interesting: Top 5 Books You Think Everyone Should Read. Any genre is game, and tell us why we should read these books. Make me want to go find them at the library and read them in one sitting, okay?

My list:

1. An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison. There are a lot of books that have been written about mental illness and how to deal with it - how to live with it - how to live with someone who suffers from it. But Jamison's book isn't just about living with mental illness, it's about living, period, and it's simply stunning. I reread Prozac Nation to remind myself that I'm not nearly as bad off as some people and that always cheers me up temporarily, but I reread Unquiet Mind to give me actual lasting hope that what I'm feeling can be overcome. This book has saved my life on more than one occasion.

2. Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg. I have never seen this book fail to inspire its readers to create. Incredible at the basest level of creativity.

3. Beach Music by Pat Conroy. In my mind, the quintessential novel in terms of storytelling written in the last twenty years. Conroy can be clunky in his language but he tells a story like nobody's business. He takes about 17 different stories in Beach Music and still manages to give them equal time, equal consideration, and the conclusion to the novel, wherein everything comes together and falls apart, is a masterwork of detail.

4. Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price. I sat on the bus when I finished this and wept until the bus driver made me get off. Conroy is a master of storytelling, but Price is about language, and the beauty of language for language's sake and nothing more. Kate Vaiden is one of the most exquisitely crafted novels I've had the pleasure of reading, and it should be read because it is simply, painfully beautiful.

5. Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because it's better than The Great Gatsby by about a mile, and if you read it, you'll understand why I say that.

And you?

Post your list either in a comment here or a link to an entry in your own journal on this entry. Feel free to post your list in your own journal, of course, but my point with these lists is fostering discussion between the people on my friends list, whether it's arguing over whether or not Catcher In The Rye sucks (it does) or simply sharing a common bond with someone over a book, a movie, a song. Also, if you're going to ask people this same question, please link to this entry and suggest they post here - this isn't a meme, really, but rather a feature of my journal specifically. I welcome anyone who wants to play.

If I go MIA at any point today, it's because I've got a metric buttload of work to do in the next two days and I decide that LJ has to go for me to do anything productive. So never fear and keep posting! I'll be back after 5, when work has released me from its evil clutches. *mwah*

ETA: Hey, shawnj - since you were the runner-up in yesterday's pick-the-topic post, go ahead and name the topic for next week; books or music or movies, your call. Email it to me by next Wednesday, if you want to make the call, or just let me know if you want to decline the decision. Woo!

So I tried - not very hard, however - to think of a Lord of the Rings related list for today, but the only one I could come up with was Top 5 Reasons Dominic Monaghan Is Clearly The Prettiest Hobbit Of Them All. Since I didn't that had particularly universal appeal, it went in the trash can straight off. (Perhaps later I will make that list, and the number one reason will be "Dear God, those hands". But that is neither here nor there, so we move on.)

So anyway, I dug through all the suggestions y'all made a couple of weeks ago, and found one I was pleased with. From dixie, this week's list is book-centric: Top 5 Favorite Authors. Fiction or non-fiction, poetry, prose or plays - who are your favorite authors? The people whose new books you wait for with baited breath? The people who, if they wrote the phone book on toilet paper and sold it for 100 bucks a copy, you'd buy it? (Okay, maybe not that last one. You know what I mean.) The authors who are long dead, and it kills you that you'll never get another book from them? Who do you love, regardless of what they're writing?

Mine are:

1. Pat Conroy. An ex introduced me to his writing, and it's one of the only good things said ex ever did. The man knows how to tell a story, but then again - I think it's a Southern thing. Whenever I'm homesick, I read one of his novels again and feel the heat and humidity and atmosphere of South Carolina settle over me.

2. Diana Wynne Jones. Not that I don't love J.K. Rowling or the Harry Potter books, because Lord knows I adore them and everything they've spawned, including an incredible fandom - but DWJ was doing it first. Exquisite fantasy novels, carefully crafted and beautifully polished. Fire And Hemlock still kills me every time I reread it.

3. Tom Stoppard. And I don't think I even need to explain.

4. Tamora Pierce. Children's novelist. I've raved about her enough here, so I'll spare you. Just: if you like fantasy novels, especially with heroines instead of heros, read The Song Of The Lioness Quartet.

5. Adrienne Rich. I can't just have novelists on this list. I discovered Rich while working in the Archives at Carleton, and fell in love with her poetry. Of course, I'm so exhausted that I can't remember the title of my favorite poem of hers, but hey: trust me when I tell you it's good.

And you?

Please post your list either in a comment here or a link to an entry in your own journal on this entry. Feel free to post your list in your own journal, of course, but my point with these lists is fostering discussion between the people on my friends list, whether it's arguing over whether or not Catcher In The Rye sucks (it does) or simply sharing a common bond with someone over a book, a movie, a song. Also, if you're going to ask people this same question, please link to this entry and suggest they post here - this isn't a meme, really, but rather a feature of my journal specifically. I welcome anyone who wants to play.

I still haven't fully processed seeing ROTK yet; yesterday I sat here vibrating at high velocity in anticipation, and today I'm vibrating at the sheer joy and beauty of it all, but at least today I'm a little more focused. I'll be thinking on it all day and I'll write up my thoughts later in the day or tonight. Long story short: I adored it, I laughed and wept and held my breath in awe - but yeah, there were a couple of bits that didn't sit quite as well as the rest of it. I am fully aware that it wasn't perfect. But it was far better than good enough, and that, my darlings, I will talk about later. Now, I have a ton of work to do. Post your lists. Entertain me.

So today? Today is Thursday, right? Well, if it's not, I don't care. I think it's Thursday, so you get a list. Books today.

Top 5 Favorite Childhood Books. Either the top 5 books you loved as a kid, or the top 5 you loved as a kid that have held up as you got older. I leave it up to you. Mine? A combination of both.

My list:

1. In The Hand Of The Goddess, Tamora Pierce. The second book in the first quartet written by Pierce, the Song Of The Lioness quartet. Among my favorite books ever. Children's fantasy novel with a female protagonist. I wanted to grow up to be Alanna, and I still re-read this one at least half a dozen times a year.

2. The Saturdays, Elizabeth Enright. My mother loved this book as a kid, and I did too. The first in a series of four; Enright's Gone Away Lake are also quite lovely.

3. Good Night, Mr. Tom, Michelle Magorian. Very few people I've met have ever heard of this novel. It's set in WW2 England, outside of London, and is the tale of a self-professed curmudgeon and his unlikely foster child. Still dig this one 10 years later.

4. Daddy-Long-Legs, Jean Webster. Early 20th century love through letters. Another one my mom and I both loved as kids. Dated and less clever now than it was, but still a favorite for comfort reading.

5. It's Like This, Cat, Emily Neville. And if any of you have any idea what this book is, you are my hero. My mother bought it for me at a discount second hand retailer when I was about 8. The story of a boy and his cat. And growing up in New York City in the late 50s. Cheesy and doesn't old up nearly so well as it did when I was a kid, but it was one of my absolute favorites when I was in elementary school.

And you? What did you love as a kid?

Unrelated: I figured out why my sense of time was all screwed up this week, for the record. See, I manage time based on when my speakers have presentation dates - they almost always have dates from Monday to Thursday, and I receive leads Wednesday through Friday. But this week? This week, JR had a speaking date on Sunday night, so I had numbers early Monday morning instead of Tuesday morning, and leads Tuesday instead of Wednesday. So I've been a day ahead all week and I cannot tell you how depressed I am that today is only Thursday. It needs to be Friday, and it needs to be Friday now.

I'm grumpy this morning. Grrrr, argh.

I want another book Top 5 for this week, but hopefully this one will produce no reading material for me to add to my list. When we listed, many weeks back, our Top 5 Favorite Books We Only Read Because We Were Forced To Read Them For A Class, someone suggested - Lockett? was it you? - that we do a Bottom 5 list, so to speak.

And I'm in the mood for that today, so that's what you get: Top 5 Worst Books You Were Ever Forced To Read For A Class (Or Just In Your Lifetime, Because Some Of The Worst Books I've Ever Read Weren't In Class). (And Whether Or Not You Finished Them.)

My list:

1. Fires In The Mirror, Anna Deveare Smith. Worst. Play. Ever. I was forced to read and/or watch this for three or four classes at Carleton, and would have been for a fifth if we hadn't revolted and demanded to read something else. Something else turned out to be her other play, Twilight, which isn't much better, but did lead to funny class discussion where the professor left us alone to have small group discussions, and came back to find the entire class making a list on the chalkboard of people we would actually pay to watch perform that script. I think Oskar Eustis, chair of the Brown University Theater Graduate Program, was the first on the list. Finished it. Several times.

2. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton. I like Wharton for the most part. This book is lame. The ending is totally lame. I wrote a paper on this book after having read only forty pages of it, and got an A-. I later went back and read the last 70. That leaves roughly 250 in the middle I didn't read. I don't worry. I bet they were awful.

3. Social and Political History of the German 1848 Revolutions, Rudolf Stadelmann. For a seminar on the 1848 German revolutions. Great class - lousy book. Boring, bland, and poorly translated. There is nothing worse than a crappy translation. Read the whole goddamned thing, because I kept hoping it would get better.

4. The Firebugs, Max Frisch. For my third term of German. Not only a play with no narrative structure and no apparent themes, but the German was lousy. We only read half of it in class because even the professor got fed up with how terrible this book was.

5. On Directing, Harold Clurman. Useless, useless book, and Ruthie insisted on teaching from it as though it was a calculus textbook - there is only one way to direct, and it is Clurman's! If you get a different answer than him, you are wrong! Loathe this book. Didn't finish it. Gave it to a sophomore upon graduation.

ETA: I forgot Harold Clurman! Edited to rectify that. He's way worse than Danielle Steele.

And you? What's the worst shit you've ever read?
(Our servers are down. Blargh. Can access internet but do no work. Wait. What's the problem with that?)

Courtesy of febrile directly, but I probably would have gotten to it eventually: Top 5 Non-Fiction Books - things that aren't fiction. Um. I suppose poetry falls into the category, since it's definitely not a novel. A rather wide category, I know, but I'm interested to see what people consider to be non-fiction. Apologies to those of you without bookshelves readily at hand. Me? I've got a bookshelf in my head.

Anyway. Mine are:

1. Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, John Berendt. Creepy and chilling and yet wonderfully funny. A snapshot, through an outsider's eyes, of life in Savannah, Georgia. And the cemetary on the cover? Both sets of my paternal great grandparents are buried there.

2. My Losing Season, Pat Conroy. Conroy writes about two things well: sports and the South. This has both, plus college basketball, which I'm a sucker for.

3. Vanished Empire, Stephen Brook. The tale of the fall of the Hapsburg Empire, told in a travelogue of Vienna, Prague and Budapest. Out of print, but my favorite book of all time about the Austro-Hungarian dynasty and its fall.

4. If I Ever Get Back To Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet To The Ground, Lewis Grizzard. Grizzard was a misogynist and a homophobe and a number of other not-good things, but the man could flat out write. Funniest person ever to write for a newspaper. Georgia is his tale of his newspaper career, from Newnan, Georgia to Chicago and back. A great read if you love the South or newspapers or both. (And the Chicago bits are funny, too.)

5. A Gentle Madness, Nicholas Basbanes. A phenomenal book about bibliophiles and bibliomania. A book about people who love books for people who love books. missingm gave me a copy for my birthday junior year at Carleton, and though it took me a year to finally read it, once I started it I couldn't put it down.

And you?

ETA: I can't believe I forgot Prozac Nation! Consider it an honorary member of this list.

they say that love is hell
but i've been laughing ever since i fell

The trouble with continuing to trust someone that everyone else in the world has stopped trusted long ago is that, inevitably, everyone else was right and you were wrong and you just get burned. And that shit? Fucking sucks.

In happier news, it's Thursday, so that means it's time for a Top 5 list. I'm seriously running out of list topics, people, so start suggesting some or you're going to begin to see the real dregs that my mind can come up with. Today's, at least, is interesting - or at least I think so. Top 5 Books (Fiction or Non-Fiction) That You Had To Read For A Class. That is to say - books you wouldn't have read on your own, but were forced by the syllabus to read for a class and enjoyed.

Mine are:

1. Summer, Edith Wharton. For my English comps, senior year. I hate every other Wharton I've ever read but this was sweet and light, in a very creepy sort of way.
2. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner. For my Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald class, senior year. Loved this but would never have finished it on my own. I keep meaning to reread it.
3. The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker. For my Linguistics class, junior year. Taking that class and reading that book at the same time as I was taking a literary theory and criticism class changed the way I looked at writing.
4. The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom. For Shakespeare's Histories and Comedies, sophomore year. Mostly I want to kick Harold Bloom in the nuts when I encounter his theory, but this is a brilliant book. His opinions on Merchant of Venice are bizarre and, in my opinion, wrong, but we could always find something to argue about in Bloom.
5. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway. For F, H & F, senior year. I hate Hemingway. There. I've said it. I hate him and you can't change my mind. I hate the novels about bull-fighting and the short stories about fishing and all that manly bullshit. So despite being told over and over again that I should read this book, I avoided it until I had to read it for class, and I adored it. This book made me go out and read every collection of letters written by the "Lost Generation" during the summer after senior year.

And you? Mostly I'm just nosy about what kind of college courses y'all took. So have at it. I have nothing to do today after yesterday's orgy of activity, so entertain me, please!

Hey! It's Thursday! How come nobody reminded me of this? I'm on vacation, days are all blurry. Anyway, that means it's time for another top five. Today, in honor of the fact that I've already written 1000 words and hope to put another 4000 or so down on paper this afternoon, you don't get a music top five - sorry, kids. It's literary today!

Your Top 5 All-Time Favorite Novels. Fiction only. Maybe we'll do non-fiction some other week, okay?

As always, if there's a particular top five you'd like to see/answer/see other people's answers to, do leave me a comment or email me. I like suggestions.

Anyway, my Top 5 All-Time Favorite Novels would be:
1. Tender Is The Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald. I loathe Gatsby and always will, but the emotion and power of struggling with mental illness in this novel will always knock me over. I read it for the first time when I was in Paris my sophomore year.
2. Beach Music, Pat Conroy. Trashy beach reading, but my favorite of Conroy's novels. I've probably read it 30 times, and it never fails to make me cry. Because I am a dork.
3. Tam Lin, Pamela Dean. We've covered why I love this one. I just do.
4. Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella. The book that Field of Dreams was based on. The best story about baseball ever written, period.
5. In The Hand of Goddess, Tamora Pierce. I've been rereading this novel twice a year since I was 8 and have no plans to stop anytime soon. It's still good, every time. This says something about a book, to me.

And you?

ETA: A Wrinkle In Time and The Stand would both be on my runners up list. And I am a trashy ho. That is all.