(Meme) Random book meme... (#icanreadchallenge)

[black_sluggard]

adja999 tagged me with the #icanreadchallenge on Facebook. I don't normally do these, but it's books, so I figured why the hell not...

** List 10 books that had an impact on you, at the top of your head, and tag 10 people to do it as well. **

(It was hard thinking of just ten...)

1. A Spell for Chameleon - Piers Anthony
This goes at the top, because it was this book that, in middle school, launched me into a period of (honestly, truly obsessive) reading. I honestly became an unholy terror...you did not want to deal with me if I didn't have a book to read.

(Though as I got older and started to pick up on the recurring ephebophillic themes, it kind of turned me off of his writing specifically...)

2. Raven - S.A. Swiniarski
I've read this book more times than its quality probably merits, but it hit so many of my kinks as a reader that I have literally re-read it more than fifteen times, and even made cursory attempts at adapting it into a graphic novel. The protagonist is an ex-cop (kink) turned PI who wakes up with amnesia (kink) and realizes very quickly that something else is really wrong, though he can't put his finger on it. He soon realizes, however, that the missing girl he'd been looking for was abducted by vampires, but at some point in trying to find her he'd become a vampire himself (omfgkink).

The book featured excellent angst, with a particularly poigniant scene between the main character and his adult daughter once she realizes her father has wound up noticable less than human. Also, the "vampire gimicks" in this book are pretty unique. They defs do not sparkle.

3. American Gods - Neil Gaiman
This was the first book I read by this author, before I'd ever started reading comics. American Gods was fantastic, and gritty, and evocative, and a bunch of other word. It pulled absolutely no punches. It lead me, not only into the author's many other amazing novels (Neverwhere. Stardust. Good Omens. OMG.), but his Sandman comics were my gateway into the Vertigo imprint and all the other amazing titles there (including Fables and Hellblazer).

4. Feet of Clay - Terry Prachett
This wasn't the first Discworld book I ever read (Wyrd Sisters has that honor), but it was the first of the City Watch books that I read, featuring Commander Samuel Vimes, and I was instantly hooked. All of the clever, thoughtful, zany fantasy of the full Discworld series, plus the mystery procedural tropes I know and love. And Vimes is an awesome, pragmatic grump of a character I just instantly fell in love with.

5. Dragonbane - Barbara Hambly
There is a lot of very good, very popular high fantasy series out there. The Winterlands books will probably never be popular on the level of Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, or A Song of Ice and Fire, but they made an impression on me in a way few other series have. Overall, her characters tend to be older, and rather world-worn, subject to very realistic emotional and physical consequences of their actions. The witches, dragons, dragonslayers, and demons encountered in this particular series are all quite different than one might expect, in a way that's very refreshing.

And one of the main characters, John Aversin, is another one of those I fell in love with almost instantly. :)

6. I, Strahd: Diary of a Vampire - P.N. Elrod
I'd read a lot of Elrod's works previously. I liked them. In general, I liked what she did with vampires as people - characters who bumble, and make stupid mistakes, and act like dorks, and know how to laugh at themselves when they do. I, Strahd was different...though the protagonist was written to be very sympathetic, there was never a moment when it escaped me that he was absolutely the villain.

But, more than that, it was a novel set in Ravenloft which soon became my favorite D&D campaign setting...before I'd even managed to actually play D&D.

I think this was also the book that launched my tradition of starting a new vampire novel at sunset, and trying to finish it by sunrise.

(I managed well before the sun was up, so I went back to the beginning and started reading it again) :D

7. Principia Discordia or How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her - Greg Hill & Kerry Thornley
We live in an inherently disordered universe, subject to chance and entropy, and even the world we percieve is a construct of unreliable chemical reactions interpreting input recorded by crude sensory devices made of meat. How anyone can believe in an objective reality is beyond my comprehension, and having the conviction that everything follows some kind of mystical order set out by an omnipotent and all knowing benevolent being boggles my friggin' mind...

Discordianism is as much religion as I can stand to profess. Which is to say, it comes pretty close to capturing my personal perception of the randomness of the universe. The book is also a hilarious read.

It's probably cheating, but I'm going to piggy-back the Illuminatus! trilogy (Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson) into this list entry, as those novels are based off of the philosophy outlined in the Pricipia Discordia. Plus Lovecraftian funtimes.

8. Daughter of the Forest - Juliet Marillier
There's honestly nothing impressive about this book, it was just there for me at a time I needed it. My youngest sister had left for schooling in Connecticut, my other young sister was no longer living at home, and I'd suffered a computer crash that I thought had destroyed a significant amount of my writing.

I'd gotten a copy of this book somewhere and never looked at it very closely. After we dropped my sister off at the airport, it caught my eye on the book shelf...probably because of the swan on the cover (I was writing a story concerning swan maidens at the time, and I'm convinced the main character of that story pointed this book out to me). When I finally did look at it, I realized that it was an adapation of the fairytale "The Six Swans", which had always been one of my obscure favorites. And the character was grieving for absent siblings just like I was (her brothers were turned into swans), and that really helped me at the time.

9. Necroscope - Brian Lumley
Necroscope is about ghosts and vampires. It is. Except that it's not. It's a Cold War story about psychic spies fighting creepy alien parasites from an alternate dimension. The monsters were creepy, and grostesque, and fantastic, and I'd say the series as a whole had a lot of influence on my writing that I didn't even realize until later (*cough*Sui Generis*cough*).

10. The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
It was on adja999's list when she tagged me, so it has to be here. But also, this series is probably one of the most influential in terms of how it's touched on my writing. It's...basically my holy ideal for what a contemporary urban fantasy story should be: modern irony juxtiposed over ancient myths with perfect finesse.

Sadly, I'm so far behind on this series it makes me cry...

I've tagged five others on Facebook. On the off chance LJ folks have any interest in doing this, I'll tag claudiapriscus, cyren_2132,  game_byrd, and snow_white.