“I might go anywhere and do any magic I pleased if I were Peter, not Prunella.”
Zen Cho
- The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien. I literally do not know what I would do without Tolkien’s beautiful and terrible hope, and the horns of Rohan blowing in the morning. And: “Day will come again!”
- The Discworld series – Terry Pratchett. These are just perfect little comfort blankets, all of them.
- The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – Stephen Donaldson. “The First sounded like a woman who could stand upright under any doom.”
- The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet – Becky Chambers. Sissix and Rosemary made me cry a little: just that their relationship was even a Thing that Could Happen. Oh gods, my post is going all mushy.
- Sorcerer to the Crown – Zen Cho. I just finished this, and Prunella is completely awesome: “You forget, ma’am, that I have myself.”
- Sabriel – Garth Nix. I’m very grateful, retrospectively, that I had these books when I was younger, because they sort of took it for granted that young women could be awesome and independent and didn’t really make a fuss about it, which, looking back, is practically revolutionary.
- The Mirror Empire – Kameron Hurley. I mean, I disliked this book pretty much all the way through, but polyamory.
- The Scar – China Mieville. “What I do now, I do for me.”
- Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Marisha Pessl. I very much feel that this is “my” book – the book that gets at what it’s like to be me. It feels like an old friend – and I’ve only read it twice.
- The Madwoman in the Attic – Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. I am grateful for this book as a feminist and as an ex-student: it has saved my essays on many an occasion and it contains some really important, formative thinking for any feminist (even if it is a bit strident).
(The theme for this post was suggested by the Broke and the Bookish’s weekly meme Top Ten Tuesday.)
The English Student 