Book meme (78/365)

[white_hart]

Via naraht intially, but coming up all over.

Pick a number to get an answer from me. Or give your own answer to someone else's question. Or just borrow the meme – it would be amazing to see this one get some traction!

1. A book that haunts you

2. A book that was an interesting failure

3. A book where you really wanted to be reading the "shadow" version of the book (as in, there are traces of a different book in the work and you would have much preferred to read that one)

4. A book with a worldbuilding detail that has stuck with you

5. A book where you loved the premise but the execution left you cold

6. A book where you were dubious about the premise but loved the work

7. The most imaginative book you've seen lately

8. A book that feels like it was written just for you

9. A book that reminds you of someone

10. A book that belongs to a specific time in your mind, caught in amber

11. A book that came to you at exactly the right time

12. A book that came to you at the wrong time

13. A book with a premise you'd never seen before quite like that

14. A book balanced on a knife edge

15. A snuffed candle of a book

16. The one you'd take with you while you were being ferried on dark underground rivers

17. The one that taught you something about yourself

18. A book that went after its premise like an explosion

19. A book that started a pilgrimage

20. A frigid ice bath of a book

21. A book written into your psyche

22. A warm blanket of a book

23. A book that made you bleed

24. A book that asked a question you've never had an answer to

25. A book that answered a question you never asked

26. A book you recommend but cannot love

27. A book you love but cannot recommend

28. A book you adore that people are surprised by

29. A book that led you home

30. A book you detest that people are surprised by

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

22. please, Bob!

[white_hart]

Hmmm. Most romance is warm-blankety, but I'm going to go for Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma's Sing For the Coming of the Longest Night because that's also Christmassy or at least midwintery.

[alithea]

1 please 😁

[white_hart]

David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks. Not in a good way.

[alithea]

Ah. I've only read Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, both of which I mostly enjoyed (there were one or two threads in CA where I really didn't care for the narrator but the others kept me going and I was intrigued by the way it all linked together, and I got the distinct feeling I'd have got more out of TTAOJDZ if I understood the rules of Go). I have a vague memory of looking at the premise for The Bone Clocks and deciding to pass, and you are not making me regret that decision!

[white_hart]

It was brilliantly written and really engaging, and then it just took a sudden swerve into full-on near-future dystopia when I was far too engaged to deal with that emotionally.

[girlyswot]

17.

[white_hart]

This is really hard! Every book I've ever read has taught me something about myself, but I think I'll go for Ursula Le Guin's A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else, which taught me that it was OK not to be like the other kids and that I wasn't actually alone.

[joyeuce]

Snap!

[hilarita]

14?

[white_hart]

The Handmaid's Tale. Balanced between hope and despair, and never actually coming down one way or the other.

[cmcmck]

21 if you please!

[white_hart]

Probably The Lord of the Rings, for all its flaws - I read it so early, and loved it so much, as a child.

[cmcmck]

It's huge for me too- largely because of the journey and the experiences along the way.

[jinty]

30 (partly because I’m not totally sure what I would choose for this)

[white_hart]

I don't know how surprised people would actually be, because I get the sense it is a bit Marmitey, but Becky Chambers' A Closed and Common Orbit, which most liberal-lefty SFF fans absolutely adore but which I found utterly shallow and depressingly trying to turn individual happiness in a pretty grim universe into a fluffy feelgood story.

[jinty]

I don’t know that book at all in fact but will bear your view in mind if I do come across it! My pick for this would probably be Levy Grossman’s The Magicians, which I hated with a fiery passion. It was Narnia crossed with Harry Potter done in “adult” style with sex and violence, and I really wish the author had just left Narnia alone or, I dunno, done it as well as the better Narnia fics do.

[alithea]

I have another friend who should be its target audience who found it similarly shallow. I have enjoyed all her books but I'm not a super fan, I'd take Murderbot over them any time.

[rachelmanija]

15!

[white_hart]

Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Broken Road - literally snuffed out mid-sentence.

[aurumcalendula]

2!

[white_hart]

The first two books of Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota (published as Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders, though originally written as one book). The first half utterly blew me away with the originality of the world-building, and then second half completely failed to deliver on that promise.

[norfolkian]

27!

[white_hart]

Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. Its approach to gender was absolutely revolutionary to me when I first read it in the early 90s, and it is a book that shaped a lot of my thinking, but it's very 70s-feminist and Piercy signed an anti-trans manifesto a few years ago and hasn't retracted that, so I don't feel I can recommend her work any more.

[el_staplador]

5, please?

[white_hart]

A book I tried to read recently which was about lesbian space pirates, which you'd think couldn't fail, but it was just appallingly badly paced and clunkily written. Which is such a shame, because lesbian space pirates.