15 books meme

[cimorene]

1. Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede¹


2. Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones ²


3. The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones²


4. Light Raid by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice


5. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen


6. The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer


7. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster


8. Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis


9. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys³


10. Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen⁴


11. Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany


12. Triton by Samuel R. Delany


13. The Wood Wife by Terri Windling


14. American Gods by Neil Gaiman


15. Past the Size of Dreaming by Nina Kiriki Hoffman⁵

These are roughly in chronological order. I read #1 for the first time sometime around my 7th birthday and #15 in 2005.

Maybe it shouldn't come as such a surprise to me, but I really don't like books written by men. If I had to make a list much longer than this, some more male authors would make an appearance, but they're not as compelling and memorable for the most part, so as I weighed books mentally against each other, or individually, I kept thinking things like "Well, I really like Saberhagen's Dracula and The Chronicles of Amber, but they didn't really feel as significant". Same for some fairly well-liked books by female authors but with male protagonists (Even so, 6 of the books listed have at least a half-time male protagonist).

Even more obviously, of course, I barely consider non-genre fiction worth reading, let alone significant or memorable. In my life only a tiny fraction of my pleasure reading has been non-genre (fantasy, sf, mystery, Regency, crime), but I've certainly read plenty of non-genre books which aren't on this list (usually because they made me in school, or because I couldn't get my hands on anything genre to read). I think the transformative nature of Wide Sargasso Sea is what makes it so powerful to me, and of course Heyer's Regency novels are all historical fiction. Austen, though, will have to stand without any crutches. She is unmistakably mainstream literature, but on the plus side, she's a witty feminist and one of the greatest writers who ever lived.

Footnotes

1. Dealing with Dragons is #1 chronologically but #2 in written order in The Enchanted Forest Chronicles: Talking to Dragons, Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, and Calling on Dragons.
2. Witch Week and The Lives of Christopher Chant are both part of The Chrestomanci Quartet. The other two are Charmed Life and The Magicians of Caprona.
3. Wide Sargasso Sea is a tranformative prequel to Jane Eyre.
4. Sister Light, Sister Dark has two sequels, White Jenna and The One-Armed Queen.
5. Past the Size of Dreaming is a sequel to A Red Heart of Memories. A Stir of Bones is a later prequel to both of them.

Comments

[spark]

Lincoln's Dreams is high on my list too, although maybe not top 15. But certainly top 50 =)

[cimorene]

Of course, some of this is context dependent. I was a lot easier to impress when I was a kid, and a cool idea is always more mind-blowing when it's new or particularly relevant to you. I read Lincoln's Dreams at an impressionable age, and somewhat shortly after studying the Civil War from a Southern perspective in school, which made it stick very firmly in my mind. For example, Passage and The Doomsday Book are two more Willis books that I'd say are about as well put-together and potentially mind-blowing, but they didn't happen to blow my mind quite as much.