queenlua | 100 books meme

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here's a list of 100 books that were formative to me in some way, changed me in some way, etc etc

some books have aged better than others but are still there out of, y'know, honesty

i am probably forgetting so much shit from my childhood lol. alas i am not in front of my childhood bedroom bookshelf so i cannot stare at it to try and remember!

ANYWAY. how many books overlap OR (because this is more interesting than a number): any overlaps we share that are particularly exciting? any books you want to hear me ramble about?

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some super good stuff there!

i loved deltora quest too! formative weird fantasy for me as a kid!

also, visser specifically from animorphs! interesting/cool choice, i'd love to hear why that one stood out. (if i had to pick an animorphs book, i'd pick one of the trio about David: those hit me hard as a kid when i read 'em.)

i also loved dealing with dragons! that was such a fun series and one that inspired so much of my writing as a teen. always glad to see wild magic/tamora pierce, such good books.

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do you remember that scene in deltora quest where they enter the forest where the insect-creatures make The Most Horrible Noise In The World and that alone does them in. that series did those Big Cool Fantasy Setpiece scenes so WELL i had so much fun with em

(also: just occurred to me Unicorns of Balinor & the Goosebumps choose-your-own-adventure books probably also should've been contenders lmao)

Visser: oh gosh there's so much juicy stuff in that one. one, i'm just weak for a tragic backstory; Visser One's deal has been so mysterious for so long at that point so it was fascinating to learn about that. also the dynamics of Visser-One-being-lowkey-in-love-with-Eva were kind of wild? like i remember vividly how Visser One did this game where she would let Eva have just a little bit of control, just to see what she'd do with it... at one point making it where Eva could independently blink one eye... and Eva waits and waits for weeks and weeks and closes her eye during a crucial moment when Visser One's driving a car and gets them in a huge accident that almost kills them and Visser One is like "damn Eva is so smart and determined, hot" and they just have some kind of Vibe going on it's so good. and Visser One CALLING THE ANIMORPHS TO HAVE THEM STAGE AN ATTACK TO DISCREDIT VISSER THREE???? juicy politics at its BEST it's so GOOD

i picked it on impulse but honestly i could've chosen a lot as the stand-in for Representative Animorphs Book. i really loved The Hork-Bajir Chronciles (the deal with how "seers" related to the rest of their species was kind of interesting to me), Back to Before (BAD END AU GOD IT'S SO GOOD), The Pretender (the whole scene where Toias has to LET NO EMOTION SHOW when he finds out elfangor's his dad??? SO good), The Capture (Jake getting infected by a yeerk, early but banger), The Reunion (where Marco gets his famous "ruthless" bastard monologue), The Conspiracy (mostly mid but do you remember when Jake deadass asks Ax to torture Chapman? and Ax agrees because he's got that "prince" complex around Jake but he's so PISSED about it (“<No, Prince Jake, nothing about this is good,> Ax snapped. <This is not behavior suitable to a warrior. I will not do this again.>”), The Illusion (look it's tobias!whump. i am not immune to tobias!whump)... god this whole series has so many bangers. (the David trilogy is ALSO good and in particular i love how it brings out Rachel's killer edge and Marco's suspicious intensity but. too many to pick from!)

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28/100 for me!! In particular -

- WOLF'S RAIN!! That was weird shit and I loved it back in the day!
- Remains of the Day is one of my favorite books in memory honestly but I have never reread it, or maybe once; I should go back to it...
- wooo Canticle for Leibowitz represent
- look that Revenge of the Sith novelization is just. so much fun.
- eyyy shoutout to Trickster Makes This World! Glad you liked, it often returns to my mind in many a context

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wolf's rain is so weird. and i think the manga wound up better than the show in a lot of ways for having to do everything in such an abridged space? keeps quite a lot of the fascinating aesthetics without really feeling like it Needs to land a big resolution or whatever...

also yo i have lowkey gotten like multiple other people to read that trickster book lol. it's good!!!! it's good!!!

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landofnowhere

22/100 -- but the overlaps we share are particularly iconic (some are books that I had already considered putting on a hypothetical list if I made one). Sophie's World! To Mock a Mockingbird! Also some overlap in the pre-Harry Potter YA fantasy space :-) Also, I had mostly forgotten that Garrison Keillor-edited poetry collection, but I remember checking it out from he library, and that it had Elvis Kissed Me.

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honestly i credit that poetry collection a lot for my future love of poetry! it's got such a good range, picked from such a variety that i think just about anyone would find something they enjoy in it... prior to that i think i thought of poetry as mostly old-fashioned and sticking to rules of rhyme and such so it was neat to have lil-kid-me's brain expanded like "oh there's so much more going on in this scene than i knew"

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landofnowhere

That's great! I get my love of poetry from my family mainly, but I also had a poetry collection that I imprinted on as a teenager (A Poem a Day edited by Karen McCosker and Nicholas Albery).

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troisoiseaux

Only 9/100, which is my lowest score yet! And most of those were The Classics(TM).

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ohhh, do you have a list of your own i can try? i like JUST noticed this meme going around yesterday (i've been out of the loop) & i'm playing catch-up with everyone else's...

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troisoiseaux

Here! Many of them are objectively not very good but captured my imagination and were on heavy rotation as re-reads at various points in my life.

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i got 14 on yours! (i strongly considered adding Stiefvater's The Dream Thieves to mine; i liked the whole cycle but thought that one was a particular standout.) also was delighted to see Americanah on yours; i really enjoyed that one myself <3

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helicoprion

So I read all the Redwall books as a child or tween but do not remember what happened in what book or anything specific about Mattimeo - mind elaborating why that one grabbed ya? (trying to remember which ones were my big favorites at the time, and I'm pretty sure the crown goes to Pearls of Lutra. But the one I REREAD the most was Salamandastron, because unlike most of the series, that book at least lived in my room and not my brother's, lolol)

Also weird coincidence but I just grabbed Art and Fear from the library yesterday

Edited Date: 2025-04-11 11:16 am (UTC)

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Mattimeo had Queen Warbeak Sparra's death in glorious battle & she was my fave, naturally, because hotheaded bird :p lots of bird battles in that one in general. (Outcast of Redwall was the other one I considered, though I reread it lately and discovered I was SO MAD at the ending that I deadass MADE UP A NEW ONE and FORGOT THE REAL ENDING??? I was so thrilled as a kid to have a ferret as a good guy and... yeah that didn't pan out lol.) You should check out

uskglass's list tho; it has Pearls of Lutra :)

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helicoprion

Oh fuck Warbeak rules and I had completely forgotten that was a thing that happened. Maybe... A revisit.... I'm doing a lot of kidlit lately anyway, it'd fit right in...

(I was SO angry about Outcast of Redwall even at the time, I remember doubling down on making vermin OCs afterward, bahahaha. And then got even madder in retrospect as a slightly older kid, realizing otters and badgers are also mustelids but we're gonna arbitrarily call every OTHER weasel-shaped guy ontologically evil? When they're all so cool????)

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THEY ARE ALL SO COOL. YOUR POINT ABOUT MUSTELIDS IS SO VALID PREACH IT

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12/100! a notable additional amount have been on the reading list since forever though. :) overlapped books were mostly the 'want to hear more about these fun cool weirdos' nonfiction type of books, an interest that i think we've shared for ages.

in a hurry packing but LOVE this meme and will make my own soon <3

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can't wait to see your list!!!! and yeah in this house We Love Fun Cool Weirdos lmao

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24, and I'm so excited about the rest of your list...

handshake no exit and gilgamesh, both of which I almost put on mine!!!

would LOVE to hear about art and fear. really thinking about horror aesthetics at the moment and about (neuro)aesthetics in general all the time

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hahaha, art and fear is not really about horror aesthetics! it's a pretty thin volume that's like. one of those How To Do Art/Creative-Stuff advice books, right. which is normally a genre i'm tetchy about (i hate feeling like i'm being barked at or condescended to; i hate advice that feels so generic as to be useless; i hate how 101-tier so much of them are)... but that one had enough insights that did sort of reframe how i think about, like. how to Set Up Your Life in a way such that The Art Keeps Flowing, in a way that was less hustle-culture-grindset and more woo-zen but like. actionable ones?

this passage is pretty representative of the better takeaways one might get from the book, so if you dig that it may be good! and if not it's SHORT at least lol

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oh, still interesting!! i'm definitely working on How To Work without Relying on Fear so consider this recommendation taken

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necrophilia

3/100!

I love the fact that you read the novelisation of Revenge of the Sith. Did you feel the SW books are worth it?

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i'm actually not a Star Wars person overall & dislike most pulp-y paperback franchise books... but i have a HUGE fondness for Revenge of the Sith in particular, so i checked out the novelization from the library after watching the movie because i wanted more, and, Matthew Stover is a fucking banger author it turns out? (i proceeded to read more of his other stuff thereafter haha) if everyone wrote pulp paperback franchise books that way i'd have a lot more fun with them? guy just kind of nails everything it feels like pulpy books should be doing. there's an amazing overwrought extended metaphor about Anakin's fall into the dark side that is still vivid in my mind after all these years (dark dragon orbiting a distant dying star); the battle sequences and banter are FUN; and it really fills in a lot of the emotional texture that Anakin's relationships lacked in the movie, in a way that makes the story land arguably more satisfyingly. so i guess i don't have an opinion on Star Wars in general but MATTHEW STOVER KNOWS WHAT'S UP

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silveredeye

16/100 for me.

Besides the obvious (Too Like the Lightning, Gilead, various classics) I have also read The Player of Games (not my favorite Banks, but a solid one), and I really loved Kokoro. Would love to hear any rambling you have about either/both of those. :D

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The Player of Games is the only Banks i've read but i've been reading to mean more; i've heard such good things!!!!

it was initially recommended to me by a friend who said it's his favorite novel & said friend is also perhaps the BIGGEST strategy/board game enthusiast i know, so when i was reading i was like "ok lmao this tracks"... but i also liked that there were larger Themes licking the edges of the main narrative (which indeed felt mostly like Biggest Board Game Nerd On Earth throws down). the alcoholic ambassador character was INTERESTING (and i'm told he gets more development in other novels?), and the sort of ambient contemplation of "what sorts of *problems* exist in a Fully-Automated Gay Luxury Space Communism society" was really interesting... like the MC certainly seemed to fit uneasily into his own society in certain ways, and clearly cared more about the game than he did about larger societal/diplomatic goals, but you get the sense he can't *escape* those larger questions in a way i found nice and chewy.

i keep a loose list of "paired reading" suggestions (books that i think may be particularly interested read back-to-back or simultaneously) and i think Player of Games could pair interestingly with a lot of books... particularly The Glass Bead Game which has gotta be one of my all-time favorites; i read it back in middle school and it still haunts me today haha

(Kokoro is one that i read aaaaall the way back in freshman year of high school, so my concrete memories are fuzzier... i was doing that thing where i was Ambiently Interested In Literature From Outside The English-Speaking World, and it was The Japanese Novel That Happened To Be On The Shelf In My High School Library... i remember puzzling a long time over K's death (why it happened, how Sensei felt about it), and WHY the narrator was so interested in Sensei in the first place, and remember finding the sparse prose so different than anything i'd read before and so beautiful... in hindsight i think part of why it made such an impact on young!me was that it was probably my earliest effort at Trying To "Get" A Book without any kind of teacher, sparknotes, reviews on the internet, etc, to guide me? so i just remember being like Wow, Big Feelings, What Is Happening Here kind of deal lol. really good random high school library find; i bet adult!me would get a lot more out of it lol)

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20 for me! I was a little worried when I hadn't read the first several Le Guin, but fortunately you had lots more, haha.

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i had to make a conscious effort not to list EVEN MORE le guin lol; i've read so much of her stuff! but the ones i picked are def among the tippiest-toppiest tier i love her...

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Oooh, I love this list. I only got 11/100 but some of the hits were my all time favorite books. Kokoro literally changed my life. And Dealing with Dragons was my absolute favorite book when I was a little kid.

I am intrigued by the inclusion of Kierkegaard here, because I am trying to read him for the first time and he's driving me nuts. I never thought I'd want to retreat into the warm and comprehensible embrace of Nietzsche. So I'm curious about what your feelings about him are and what you felt his effect on you was.

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kokoro <3333 dealing with dragons <33333

re: kierkegaard: ah, alas i'm probably useless on that front. i read him as a teen & remember more vibes and how he made me feel than any concrete arguments or argumentation on his part. i do remember reading him at the same time i was reading William James's essay "The Will to Believe" and i think they're both playing with similar ideas, James in a more accessible fashion... there was something very moving about Kierkegaard's account of faith as The Thing You Simply Gotta Take A Gamble On, whereas James's formulation is more "assuming none of these important barriers are in the way, the leap is philosophically sound & also can create reality to some degree," but like, they're both banger

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I'll have to check out William James too. I feel like if I try to put Kirkegaard in my own words I'd butcher it completely, but the thing he's been repeating that's gotten me has been "if you got it you can't articulate it" so far.

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DEALING WITH DRAGONS

(my own list is so much less with the classics than this but omg, Patricia C. Wrede. also A+ for LeGuin.)

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dealing with dragons 10/10 school library find, ty mrs. [elementary school librarian] you were a real one

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0/100, how's THAT for an interesting number of overlaps--

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!!!!

airlock!!!

AIRLOCK!!! CLEARLY i am not doing a good enough job yelling at people to read my faves :P

fwiw the mysterious stranger is very short and i sort of have a feeling you'd dig that one in particular lol. if thou wishest to join the club

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ayyyye 15/100. a lot of these titles are on my tbr that i'm familiar with even if i haven't read them hahaha

David Clement-Davies... literally have The Sight and Fell in my car to trade in at the local used bookstore tomorrow. now i'm wondering if i should part with them! XD

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WHAT. omg. if it's not too late!!! SAVE YOUR CLEMENT-DAVIES imo. they hold up better than you'd think!!!

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eeeee i saved them. i don't reread books super often but argh i do remember having a good time with his. the wolves were extremely cool..

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