- Lirael – Lirael, Garth Nix. She works in a library and she doesn’t like talking to people, but she has a rich inner life. I mean, she’s basically me. If I worked in a library.
- Hermione Granger – Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling. Basically because she’s bookish and academic and we would bond over our shared dislike for rule-breaking.
- Ponder Stibbons – the Discworld series, Terry Pratchett. Ponder is just a complete nerd. And he takes life seriously. So, naturally, he would be my friend.
- Meggie Folchart – Inkheart, Cornelia Funke. She sleeps with books under her pillow! And has read all the books! My kind of person.
- Katin Crawford – Nova, Samuel Delany. Katin’s a little bit anxious, and he’s working on a long pretentious novel even though the form’s been obsolete for centuries. Yep, sounds like my kind of person.
- Fuschia – Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake. Fuschia’s another character with a rich inner life and a less-than-satisfactory external one. She’s prickly, but once you were friends with her you’d be friends for life.
- Rosemary Harper – The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers. Rosemary is geeky about paperwork, and also does not like breaking rules. Check, check.
- Nutt – Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett. Nutt is just adorable: achingly polite, intensely clever and, oh, an orc.
- Arthur Dent – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams. There’s a bit somewhere in the trilogy where Arthur breaks the spaceship because he’s trying to get a proper cup of tea out of the vending machine and YES.
- November – Palimpsest, Catherynne Valente. November’s intense, lonely, focused, fascinating.
(The prompt for this post was suggested by the Broke and the Bookish’s weekly meme Top Ten Tuesday.)
The English Student 