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To state the obvious right away: I have blatantly stolen the topic of this post from John Scalzi; his (original, better-written, much more SF-heavy) entry with the exact same title can be found here. In fact, I’m going to steal his idea to the extent that I’m actually going to quote him from his intro:

What does “meant the most to me” mean? Pretty much what it says — that these works are the works I returned to again and again as pieces of writing, as stories, and as experiences. I’m not interested in arguing whether these books and works are the “best”; I couldn’t possibly care about that. I am interested in explaining why they mean as much as they do to me.

Other than the first few entries, and particularly the first, these are in no particular order. Oh, and since I might as well put this here: One thing that has sort of annoyed me as I’ve put this list together is that I can’t honestly put many books by women or people of color on it. You’re gonna see Margaret Weis and Salman Rushdie and that’s about it; the list would be very different if I were including books from, say, the last ten years and not my entire life. Go find something by N.K. Jemisin or Cherie Priest or Saladin Ahmed or Sheri Tepper or Helene Wecker or Nnedi Okorafor or Seanan McGuire; they’re all gold. I just can’t put them on an “entire life” kind of list just yet.

1) The Hobbit/ The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien: The one everybody who has ever met me could have predicted was going to be on this list. I first read the One Trilogy to Rule them All in something like second grade and have tried to reread them at least once a year since then; there have been many years, especially when I was younger, that I read them multiple times a year. I’m 37; I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve read them 35 to 40 times by now, if not more than that.

My uncle gave me these books– The Hobbit first, and LOTR soon after when it became quickly clear that I was not yet satisfied. By doing so, he became more responsible than any other living human– and I think I include my parents in that; my personality is in many ways much more like my uncle than either my mom or my dad– for me developing into the enormous unwashed nerd you see before you now.

(Oh: he also told me that “mutton” was gorilla arm when I first asked him about it, a lie I continued to believe for far, far longer than I ever ought to have.)

I still own my original copies of all of these books. I do not intend to be buried, but I do want them with me when I’m cremated.

2) Watership Down, by Richard Adams. “Silflay hraka, u embleer rah” may be the only example of a line from a book in a foreign language that I have memorized; it’s Lapine, rabbit-language, for “Eat shit, stench-king.” Wait, no, there are two; Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani is floating around there somewhere but I likely only know that one because of hiphop. I actually don’t remember how I came across Watership for the first time– honestly, it was probably uncle Dave again, which is gonna be a theme– but it’s another perennial, a book I read at least every year or two. I’ve done class projects on this book, I’ve read it to kids, I’ve written papers on it, and my wife and I have semi-matching tattoos from it: I have el-Ahrairah on my left shoulder blade, and she has the Black Rabbit of Inlé in the same location. Oddly, nothing else by Adams has managed even close to the same impact.

Some may dispute this book’s status as fantasy; it features psychic rabbits that go on an adventure together; shut up.

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3) Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie. I suspect I’ve bought more copies of Haroun than any other book other than the LOTR series and the Bible; I’ve certainly given away more copies of it than anything else I can think of. I don’t get Haroun, it’s as if Salman Rushdie killed Neil Gaiman and J.K. Rowling and then spent a long weekend dismembering them and smoking their ashes. It’s not like anything else he’s ever written– it’s a fairy tale, first and foremost, cloaked in dozens of mythical and literary and historical allusions and yet still written in language that is clear and accessible to anyone literate. There’s none of the pretense that shows up in Rushdie’s other work; this is unapologetically a book that can (and should be) enjoyed by children. And it’s meant to be read aloud– when I was a language arts teacher in Chicago, I used this as a read-aloud for both of my classes both years I taught there, and it worked wonderfully both years. The recently-released sequel, Luka and the Fire of Life, was good but not as magical. This is my favorite book that I don’t have a tattoo of.

4) His Dark Materials trilogy, by Phillip Pullman. Wait, no, I lied; I don’t have a Dark Materials tattoo yet, although one’s been in the planning stages for a while. These books are special because I read the first one really not expecting much of anything out of it– in fact, I may have actually been coerced into reading it. I loved it and by the third book I was as hooked as I’ve ever been into anything. I love the hell out of this story; the third book may be the only book that’s ever made me cry on a goddamn reread, which ought to be impossible. Bits of it were quoted at my wedding, for crying out loud.

The movie was godawful, from what I heard, and they never made any sequels– which is fine, because the subject matter (“little children try to kill God” is not a totally unfair paraphrase) is absolutely unfilmable. I don’t care; this is one of the most wonderful, life-and-love-affirming series I’ve ever read, and I’ll fight you if you try to tell me different.

I’ve read nothing else by Pullman. I’m almost afraid to.

5) Dragonlance: Chronicles trilogy, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. I like that the cover image I was able to find for this is kind of beaten up, because I read the everloving hell out of these books in fifth and sixth grade and my copies look just like this. The Dragonlance books were probably the first fantasy series that I got really into that didn’t have my uncle’s fingerprints on them either metaphorically or literally– I don’t know that he’s ever read the series, and since I’ve read Weis and Hickman’s work as a grownup and not terribly enjoyed it it may be too late for him. But, man, in fifth grade, where all I thought about was girls and Dungeons and Dragons and really didn’t have enough opportunities to play with either, these books were what I marinated my brain in when I didn’t have any other opportunities. I haven’t reread them in a good long time– mostly because I suspect the charm will have worn off– but I could polish off a Dragonlance book in three hours in sixth grade, so I read them all the damn time. I may have read Autumn Twilight more often than any other book than Fellowship of the Ring, and that’s really saying something.

6) A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin. Did you notice how this one was a reference to a single book, and didn’t include the word series or trilogy or heptalogy or whatthefuck ever? Good, it’s intentional. Thrones is fucking brilliant, the best introductory novel to a series I’ve ever read. And each book in the series after that has gotten progressively worse (with a brief uptick right around the Red Wedding) to the point where I’m not sure I’m even buying The Winds of Winter and I might punch George R. R. Martin if I ever meet him. But, God, Thrones was freaking amazing: unpredictable, fresh, treading the same ground that Tolkien inspired but managing to do it in a way that felt like something new and not a retread and also no elves, which was a plus. And he managed to surprise me– and if you’ve read the book you know exactly the part I’m talking about– in a way that no other book I’ve ever read in any genre has managed. I literally had to put the book down and walk away for a while after That Part because I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Game of Thrones is a wonderful, astonishingly good book– good enough that the sequels keep getting worse and are still “great” on book three– just pretend that after that the series ends and that Feast for Crows and especially the execrable Dance with Dragons never happened.

7) Iron Man #200, by Denny O’Neil and M.D. Bright. Shut up; what’s the second word in “comic book”? Book. Iron Man #200 was the first comic book I ever read; I still have my copy, and since then I’ve managed to acquire something like 85-90% of all the Iron Man comics ever published in some form or another. This is the comic that launched a lifelong hobby even if I do want to get rid of some of the evidence nowadays. (Weirdly: that’s my most popular post ever. By a decent margin. Go figure.)

Looked at another way, this book cost me thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars over the last 28 years, just so that I can have a bunch of huge boxes that I hardly ever open taking over a third of my office. You know what? Never mind. Fuck this book.

(No, really: the Obadiah Stane storyline that culminates in this issue is seriously one of the best Iron Man stories ever told; there’s a reason they pirated it for the movie. I just wish we’d have seen the Silver Centurion armor; it remains one of my favorite designs all these years later.)

(Oh, right edit: I can add one more person of color, as I’m pretty sure Mark Bright is black, for whatever that’s worth.)

8) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. This is another entry in the “brilliant launch, weaker sequels” category, unfortunately, but holy crap I cannot even imagine how different high school might have been had I never read the Guide. Yes, I was that much of a geek. I reread this for the first time in a few years earlier this year, and it astounded me just how many huge chunks of this book I have committed to memory, a claim I can’t really make for anything else, even books I’ve reread far more times. When I first started going online– local BBSes in the early nineties, on a 300-baud dialup modem attached to a Commodore 64/128 computer– I used to play a game called Trade Wars all the time. Every Trade Wars game I ever played was replete with Hitchhiker’s references; there are probably still BBS leaderboards out there somewhere with Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz at the top all these years later.

(Well, no, there aren’t; that would be ridiculous. But it’s fun to imagine.)

9) The Belgariad, by David Eddings. The last two entries in this piece are going to be a trifle more difficult to write about as they’re functionally the same book, but The Belgariad goes first because it leads into at least ten books or so before the quality starts falling off. I was introduced to the work of David Eddings– and later, co-writer credit with his wife Leigh– by, say it with me, my uncle David, and now that I’m sitting here thinking about it my lifelong obsession with redheads may be a result of the massive crush I had on Ce’Nedra from this series. Eddings was Tolkien with a clearer system of gods and magic– the Will and the Word was great– and a young protagonist who I could relate to in a way that Frodo and Sam weren’t good for; Belgarath and Polgara were awesome, and the first book of the series contains one of the most epic dressing-downs of a main character’s idiocy that I’ve ever read, as Garion literally magics up a storm and Belgarath has to cope with the continent-wide weather disturbances that that engenders. “Do you know how much all that air weighs?”

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10) The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks. As I said, this is sort of functionally the same book as Pawn of Prophecy above; a young protagonist and his family, an older, wizardly mentor figure (this time the druid Allanon, who had me fantasizing about being able to fire blue flames from my hands for years oh hell I’m still doing it today who I am I kidding) and a mystical/magical threat to all humanity that can only be defeated by finding the MacGuffin. Shannara may be the greatest MacGuffin fantasy literature ever, actually, as the sword, when they finally actually find it (spoiler, I guess) turns out to not at all be what they think it will be, which just sorta makes the whole plan to Find The Sword and Beat the Baddie all that much more MacGuffiny.

Oh, and the cover was great. Yes, great. The Hildebrandt brothers were gods, and– again– I will fight you if you disagree with me. This one comes in slightly after the Belgariad because the sequels weren’t as tightly linked to it and because honestly they stopped being as good faster than the Belgariad/ Malloreon /Elenium / WTFever series…es ever did.

(Phew. Did you finish that? Go write your own; I want to see more of these.)

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(First things first: if you need context on the picture, go here. This post is gonna be sorta grab-baggy; it should make sense by the time I get to the end.)

Let’s start by griping about nonsense. Y’all know the song OPP, right? If you don’t we can’t be friends anymore. One of hiphop’s classic anthems; it came out when I was a sophomore in high school and therefore I will have it memorized until I die. The whole song is about infidelity, but because it doesn’t have any bad words in it and the writing is clever it got played at high school dances all the time. Combine that with the call-and-response and what you end up with is hundreds of teenagers hollering about penises and pussies in public with none of the adults noticing what’s going on. It’s wonderful. It contains this verse:

As for the ladies, OPP means something gifted
The first two letters are the same but the last is something different
It’s the longest, loveliest, lean– I call it the leanest
It’s another five letter word rhymin’ with cleanest and meanest
I won’t get into that, I’ll do it…ah…sorta properly
I say the last P…hmmm…stands for property

It doesn’t stand for property.

I was listening to the radio on the way home from school when I encountered a picture-perfect example of why I bloody fucking hate terrestrial radio: they played OPP, and they bleeped out cleanest and meanest.

They bleeped two words that rhyme with the actual name of a human body part that half of the human race has, in a song that is entirely about infidelity.

This makes sense on no levels at all, and makes me want to punch the shit out of everyone involved– like, “hit you until my hands break off at the wrists” level of pummeling. I goddamn hate bleeped songs. I feel like if you think as a corporate entity that you need to bleep part of a song you shouldn’t be playing it at all. Ideas are more dangerous than words, you stupid dumbasses. But this is a new level of stupid– even if I was willing to entertain the suggestion that the word “penis” needed to be sanitized from the airwaves, the suggestion that words that rhyme with penis should also be sanitized is so damn dumb that I’m literally in pain right now while I’m complaining about it.

Stop making me use italics, U93. I fucking hate you.

New item! I bring in the mail when I got home, and there was a flyer from our new wingnut Congresscritter in it. Jackie Walorski is enough of a discredit to humanity that I’m not even terribly interested in describing why; she won her last election largely on the backs of 1) redistricting; 2) the incumbent deciding to run (successfully) for the Senate; and 3) disgusting, pathetic accusations of carpetbagging against her opponent, who grew up here (I went to high school with him) and then moved from the area to go fight in Iraq and start a veteran’s charity in DC. It was literally true that he hadn’t lived in the area for several years, but his family still lived here and he spent the majority of his time gone on active duty and fighting in a foreign country. Even if I wasn’t against her politics– and believe me, I am– I’d think she was scum for that.

Which made it interesting to me that most of the flyer– the bit that wasn’t a slanted short questionnaire– was all about trumpeting her bill extending whistleblower protections to sexual assault victims in the military. Protecting rape victims isn’t generally something that Republicans are big on. Crowing about having done so isn’t either. Which leaves me to wonder if a) she’s trying to moderate herself a bit; b) she actually is more moderate than I’d thought; c) she’s just trying to look more moderate; or d) this is an interesting bit of microtargeting– since the flyer in question was addressed to my wife, and there wasn’t one in the mail for me. Generally when we get these sorts of things (and they come frequently enough) there’s either one of them for each of us or it’s just addressed to the household and not to either of us specifically. This one just had my wife’s name on it.

Hmmm.

Last but not least: I just got into an interesting discussion on Facebook about Mike Krahulik’s latest bit of dumbassery. (Be aware: if you don’t know who Mike Krahulik is, you probably ought not to read this part, as I don’t intend to provide a lot of context.) The person who started the thread was saying that he was done with Penny Arcade on account of not being able to support Mike’s actions any longer, and while I agree with him that the man has gotten incredibly tiresome in a lot of ways I’m not able to pull the trigger on that just yet. Which got me wondering about exactly what gets me to cut something I enjoyed out of my life on account of not agreeing with its behavior. I can think of four examples: Mel Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Dan Simmons, and Chik-Fil-A. In each of the four cases, I have previously really enjoyed their work (or their chicken; I hate Chik-Fil-A as a corporation but I will fight you if you denigrate their chicken. We can hate them for their politics but let’s not get stupid here) and am no longer willing to support them in any way because of their beliefs and/or behaviors. I kinda want to include Tom Cruise in here, too, but I was never really a fan of his so it’s not quite the same thing.

I guess the difference is hatred. Mel Gibson hates everybody. Card and Simmons and Chik-Fil-A are open in their hatred of gay people. I don’t think Mike Krahulik hates anybody. I just think he’s a sheltered geek with a short fuse, and spouting his mouth off about shit he knows nothing about frequently gets him in trouble– but I don’t think he hates anybody and I don’t think he’s trying to be an asshole most of the time. My Facebook friend made a good point that once you’re past a certain age you either need to get better about things or own your own bullshit, and he’s right about that– but at the same time I’ve fucked up in my own personal feminism in who knows how many different ways, so I’m not always inclined to jump down the throat of somebody who seems to be trying to get better about sexuality and gender issues. I’m just not sure how much more slack I’m willing to cut the guy if he’s not smart enough to figure out that “never talk about this shit extemporaneously, and have someone smarter than me read over my shoulder whenever I talk about it in print” is a sound policy.

Within minutes, a link to this article appears in my inbox. For those of you too lazy to click, it’s about how Not Intending To Do That appears to be a magical fucking power that not only insulates the Unintender from owning the negative results of their actions but causes others to defend them as well. It’s… right. It also includes the word “kyriarchy,” which means something bad, which is sad, because it’s a fun-sounding word and I’d like opportunities to use it in public.

Thinking about this more: the bit of me that wants to defend Mike is related to the bit of me that refuses to give up on certain kids (I can’t honestly say all of them) in my classes who are for one reason or another generally assholes but seem saveable to me. I think Mike’s saveable. I might be wrong, and he’s a grown-ass man with a long, long cultural reach and not a fourteen-year-old, but I think that’s another part of the difference here as to why I’m not willing to lock the door on PA just yet.