keelieinblack @ 2007-08-09T10:42:00

2007-08-09T14:42:36Z

For the record, I am now keelieinblack at Journalfen, InsaneJournal, and GreatestJournal. I can't jump ship from LJ entirely as a significant portion of my flist is staying, and I've had a permanent account since 2002, so I might as well keep using their server space until they decide to boot all of fandom off. But some of the flist is moving, too, and I can't commit to one alternative journalling service because they're all moving to different ones. So there has been a lot of friending of people's shiny new journals, since if I don't do it now then in two months I will have forgotten who moved where. Please think of me as a harmless lurker fangirl and not a creepy stalker.

(I feel extremely weird about having the minutiae of my fannish life spread out across four sites, though; I know I'm not that interesting.)

In non-LJ-is-stupid matters, a meme, ganked from 1crowdedhour and originally from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: Compile a short list of books specifically meant to help somebody understand you. These are not (necessarily) non-fiction books that catalogue your particular disorders or quirks, but books that especially resonate with you, that express a facet of you in book form.

Age 8. Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Egypt Game. I can't be the only one who read this and then tried to do it themselves, can I? Besides, this book gave me my first look at what fandom was like. Okay, maybe I'm looking at it from a weird point of view, but--you have a group of dissimilar people who get together every day to discuss and research and make up stories about a subject they think is fun and interesting. Looks like fandom to me. (Not to mention all the infighting and the secretive doings going on behind the scenes....)

Age 10. Diana Wynne Jones, Dogsbody. Very probably responsible for jump-starting my interest in mythology, my fascination with the Wild
Hunt, and my love for "a kid and his/her otherworldly companion" stories, all of which still have their sharp little claws in me.

Age 12. Tanith Lee, The Black Unicorn. Most people probably gravitate towards Don't Bite the Sun or The Silver Metal Lover, but for me it was this one. I'm just sorry it would be a few years before I realized why the keys to perfect world had to be those spiral shells. (Also at this age: 1crowdedhour's A College of Magics. I think putting a book of hers on a book-meme that I picked up from her might cause some sort of fluctuation in the universe, but I have to do it--this was the first book I read until it literally fell apart.)

Age 13. Innumerable ridiculous fantasy series. wordsofastory mentioned the Forgotten Realms/Drizzt Do'Urden books yesterday, and I had quite the fling with Dragonlance too. For the part of my soul that still needs to read something that's fun in the trashy kind of way.

Age 16. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. Even as I teenager I was reading this as a cautionary tale on some level, because I could already see echoes of myself in Eleanor.

Age 18. Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Daughter. Fall down seven times, get up eight. There's a scene near the end of this book that had such a profound effect on my own spiritual view of the universe that I actually feel a little embarrassed to admit it.

Age 20. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Please don't laugh. I read the entire thing straight through when I was in college, dog-earing pages and making little notes on entries that I thought were especially interesting or useful to know. This is reason why I know about little things like seeing ghosts when you look between a cat's ears. One of these days I'd like to get a set of the OED and do the same with it. (That's just the sort of person I am. Doesn't anyone else read the dictionary for fun?)

Also, at various ages: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass, The Waste Land, The King of Elfland's
Daughter.

Hmm. I wish I could put something more edgy or impressive on here, but I'm not that sort of person.

I wonder how this meme would work in reverse--that is, you make other people tell what books they associate with you.

Tried to listen to cheerful music yesterday and ended playing non-stop Bessie Smith instead. If you'd like to feel just as gloomy as I did, have a song:

Bessie Smith - 'T Ain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do
there ain't nothing I can do, or nothing I can say
that folks don't criticize me
but I'm goin' to do just as I want to anyway
and don't care if they all despise me

The first few verses are actually kind of positive in that going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket kind of way, but it gets soul-grindingly depressing near the end. It's the blues, what do you expect?