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Book meme! Day 27
Oct. 2nd, 2010 04:29 pmYes, I know that the 30-day meme is taking me something like 3 months to finish. I accept my own procrastination.
Not necessarily *embrace*, but accept.
Day 27 - If a book contains ______, you will always read it (and a book or books that contain it)!
I used to say that if a book contained "bad-ass near-sociopathic women with magic who occasionally kill folks" then I would absolutely read it. Unfortunately, I recently read a book that contained exactly that... and I hated it. It had so many of my favorite things! Great world-building, political intrigue, borderline-sociopathic hit-girls with style... and yet, no.
Books that contain griffins (or gryphons, or griffons - I'm not fussy) are an almost instant win for me. Frankie! set my interest way back in childhood, and then there's the excellent short story by Frank Stockton, The Griffin and the Minor Canon (and I just found out yesterday that there is a Maurice Sendak illustration of this, and I want it!). Also, of course, there is Diana Wynne Jones with the perfect Dark Lord of Derkholm and the extremely charming Year of the Griffin.
Griffins as lead fantasy characters tend to be a safer bet than dragons - all of the majestic size, magical strangeness, and fabulous impossibility - less of the heavy epic fantasy freight. (When dragons are set in a different scale they can be quite wonderful - Tea with the Black Dragon is one of my very favorite books.)
It used to be true that if a book contained girls dressed up as boys, I was almost sure to want to read it. This probably started with Beth Hilgartner's A Murder for Her Majesty, and continued through the Tamora Pierce Alanna books and on into Georgette Heyer with The Masqueraders and These Old Shades. Bloody Jack was the turning point for me there - nowadays I tend to prefer that girls have their adventures while being open about their female identity - as Jacky Faber does in her later books. I think this is partly just a factor of my age though - and partly because books where girls are dressed up as boys to have their adventures tend to be books full of exceptionalism - books where the girl-dressed-as-boy is the only girl getting to have any fun. Nowadays I want a world where lots of women and girls get to be part of the action - one is not enough.
Romance novels with assassins will almost always get me to pick them up, but fantasy novels with assassins are iffy for me.
For picture books, I'm a sucker for (not necessarily together): the moon, monkeys, pirates, robots, pigs, elephants, hippopotami, alligators (anthropomorphized only), and witches.
( Book meme list... )
Not necessarily *embrace*, but accept.
Day 27 - If a book contains ______, you will always read it (and a book or books that contain it)!
I used to say that if a book contained "bad-ass near-sociopathic women with magic who occasionally kill folks" then I would absolutely read it. Unfortunately, I recently read a book that contained exactly that... and I hated it. It had so many of my favorite things! Great world-building, political intrigue, borderline-sociopathic hit-girls with style... and yet, no.
Books that contain griffins (or gryphons, or griffons - I'm not fussy) are an almost instant win for me. Frankie! set my interest way back in childhood, and then there's the excellent short story by Frank Stockton, The Griffin and the Minor Canon (and I just found out yesterday that there is a Maurice Sendak illustration of this, and I want it!). Also, of course, there is Diana Wynne Jones with the perfect Dark Lord of Derkholm and the extremely charming Year of the Griffin.
Griffins as lead fantasy characters tend to be a safer bet than dragons - all of the majestic size, magical strangeness, and fabulous impossibility - less of the heavy epic fantasy freight. (When dragons are set in a different scale they can be quite wonderful - Tea with the Black Dragon is one of my very favorite books.)
It used to be true that if a book contained girls dressed up as boys, I was almost sure to want to read it. This probably started with Beth Hilgartner's A Murder for Her Majesty, and continued through the Tamora Pierce Alanna books and on into Georgette Heyer with The Masqueraders and These Old Shades. Bloody Jack was the turning point for me there - nowadays I tend to prefer that girls have their adventures while being open about their female identity - as Jacky Faber does in her later books. I think this is partly just a factor of my age though - and partly because books where girls are dressed up as boys to have their adventures tend to be books full of exceptionalism - books where the girl-dressed-as-boy is the only girl getting to have any fun. Nowadays I want a world where lots of women and girls get to be part of the action - one is not enough.
Romance novels with assassins will almost always get me to pick them up, but fantasy novels with assassins are iffy for me.
For picture books, I'm a sucker for (not necessarily together): the moon, monkeys, pirates, robots, pigs, elephants, hippopotami, alligators (anthropomorphized only), and witches.
( Book meme list... )
