stolen from boglin

[cybermule]

1. The Haunted House - Jan Pienkowski. It's just a wicked pop-up book, OK?
2. Danny, the Champion of the World - Roald Dahl. He lived in a carvan and defeated some posh people by liberating their pheasants. Story of 5 years of my life. [in my head *ahem*]
3. Milroy the Magician - Paul Theroux. This one is just deeply strange. It's about a little girl who goes to live with a health-freak magician in an airstream. And it's aimed at adults :) Paul Theroux also introduced me to the joy of travel writing, and spawned Louis Theroux :)
4. The Feynman Lectures. Hard maths made easy for chemists/physics properly explained.
5. The Lord of the Rings. Just because.
6. One of my OU course books last year, because that part of the course got me interested in both Old English and linguistics.
7. Circles of Stone - Aubrey Burl. Nice archaeology pics.
8. Fungus the Bogeyman - Raymond Briggs. This just had a profound influence on me - I am Fungus. I was going to say Eeyore, but I don't like the books at all.
9. Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake. More dark fantasy.
10. Crime and Punishment. Just because I finally read it, understood it and liked it.


That was really hard - I might well change it in the morning.

Comments

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

Oh, I loooooooove 'Danny, the Champion of the World'! The villain is just so very, very... loathsomely rich.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Yeah - Roald Dahl was excellent at making loathsome characters. I nearly put "Fantastic Mr Fox", just because of Boggis and Bunce and Bean, but that one was less personally relevant.

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

My favorite Dahl was 'The Twits', for the villains.

My favorite Dahl of all time is 'The Witches' - I read two copies to shreds, and had to buy a third by the time I was ten.

I like the autobiographical ones, too :)

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

I like the autobiographical ones, too :)

Me too. Did you ever read "The Story of Henry Sugar", though? I think that's my absolute favourite.

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

YES! I did. About the very rich man who could see the future (or something like that, it's been a while) and looked into the mirror and saw his own death in the form of a bloot clot moving towards his heart.

I think.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Yeah - that's the one. He learns to see through cards after he reads a book on yogic mysticism in a friend's library.

That's so neat - you're the only person I know who's read that. Or at least, the only person who I didn't harrass into reading it :)

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

I think I was about eihgt last time I read it though - I'm surprised I remembered as much as I did :p

[amiga500.livejournal.com]

Ack, I was always sort of afraid of Roald Dahl, but managed to not be upset by the Matilda movie. It probably helped that I was 20 when I saw it, though.

I don't have enough books. I did, but had to leave them with my parents, so now I have Banana Yoshimoto, a Penelope Lively book my mum gave me, a science fiction book about Buddy Holly (seriously), the old Our Bodies Ourselves, old Moosewood cookbook, and a reprint of a cookbook from the 1910's. Oh, and some really flaky guide to palmistry from the seventies. I don't like to think what those say about me, though at least having the cookbook without pictures or even cooking instructions in half the recipes probably means I'm okay in the kitchen.

[kidkarrot.livejournal.com]

Roald Dahl was the author of Matilda as well? I didn't know that, but I do remember really enjoying his James and the Giant Peach book from eons ago.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the cartoon of "James and the Giant Peach"? It's quite good!

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

I like old cookbooks and stuff. I used to have an old nurses' text-book from the early 1900s, and it was brilliant!