Aquacorde

⟡ not everything is sink or swim ⟡

Age 29
she/her/he/him
Ankh-Morpork
Seen 23 Hours Ago
Posted 3 Days Ago
12,277 posts
18.9 Years
totally stealing this from tumblr, no shame. No idea where it originated, but I thought it was cool.
I have a challenge for you! Rules: In a text post, list ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard — they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you. Tag ten friends, including me, so I’ll see your list. Make sure you let your friends know you’ve tagged them.
Basically, just think of 10 books or series that are important to you. But here's the challenge- tell us why they're important. No need to go into as much detail as I've done, but give us an idea of what these mean to you. I have to ask that you stay within the realm of books, comics graphic novels, and manga. Readable media, not playable or watchable.

So, here's my little essay and list directly copied from tumblr. Seriously, don't worry about matching this in length or detail. Just a sentence or two on each choice is fine.
  1. Bat 6, Virginia Euwer Wolff
  2. The Calvin & Hobbes Series, Bill Watterson
  3. The Discworld Series, Terry Pratchett
  4. The Harry Potter Series, JK Rowling
  5. The Shannara Series, Terry Brooks
  6. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  7. Fruits Basket, Natsuki Takaya
  8. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgeson Burnett
  9. The Apprenticeship of Lucas Whitaker, Cynthia DeFelice
  10. The Dirk Pitt Novels, Clive Cussler

I actually wanna talk about these, because I rarely do. Despite what the rules said, I spent a good about of time thinking about all of these (books are my very being) and searching for two of them. I knew what they were, and they were important, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what they were called. #9, The Apprenticeship of Lucas Whitaker, left a huge impression on me as a kid. It’s a story of desperation and confusion about a kid who loses his family to consumption (tuberculosis) when nobody really knows anything about the disease. I only read it once and that was years ago, so I don’t know if it hold up, but to this day I have nightmares about losing people to tuberculosis. Even though that’s apparently not a thing here anymore.

Bat 6 was also a huge one that I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of. Even though the rest of these are in a random order, this one is #1 for a reason. The Bat 6 is the softball game played every year between two 6th-grade girls teams and it’s this huge deal. But this time, it’s post-WWII. This time, there’s a Japanese girl on one team and a girl whose father died at Pearl Harbor on the other. It’s full of both racist characters and characters overcoming their racist mentality. It’s the reason why I’m shocked when people use the term “Jap”. Despite being familiar with Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn by the time I read this, it was really the book that opened my eyes to the impact of racism.

Huckleberry Finn was just always interesting to me. Again, it’s got kind of a discussion of racism going on in the narrative. I don’t know if it’s just not as blatant as that in Bat 6 or that I just grew up knowing more about racism against African-Americans than Asian-Americans or that it was less tragic, but it didn’t have the same kind of morality impact on me as Bat 6. However, it was an adventure in both journey and characters and definitely deserves its status as a Great American Novel.

The Secret Garden is a book that resonated with me when I was younger. It’s basically about a lonely girl making friends, and I was a rather lonely child. It was beautiful and almost mystical as well and just a well-told story that I enjoyed. Speaking of friends, later on I found Fruits Basket. That was the first series I shared with friends; a few of us would all buy volumes when we had the money and between us ended up owning the entire series. That happened around the time we were starting to timidly explore sexuality and gender identity, and characters like Ayame, Akito, and Ritsu started opening our eyes a little wider to possibilities in the world. I mean, they all ended up being cishet people, but it gave us the beginning of an understanding.

I think Calvin & Hobbes was the series that had the most impact on my sense of humor and worldview when I was younger. I didn’t understand all of it, but what I did get was pretty important. Although, it could also be said that my dad found C&H to be his favourite comic and his tastes influenced mine- his sense of humor certainly did. My enjoyment of the comic was also egged on by Calvin’s dad looking and acting like mine, haha. But seriously, great comic. Honestly a lot like the Discworld series in nature, which might be why I love that so much.

Where my Dirk Pitt novels came from is a little mysterious- I don’t remember if my grandpa introduced me to them or vice versa. But they’re all very similar action novels- hunky marine engineer/archaeologist with a fondness for chicks and classic cars and his wisecraking sidekick go on adventures and beat up bad guys. Basically marine engineer James Bond. But the books manage to be interesting and diverse in subject matter and characters and thrilling despite following the same format. Harry Potter, of course, has been with me pretty much my entire life. I was able to read them on my own, my brother was still little enough that he couldn’t. So our mom and dad would read us a bit every night up until we finished Goblet of Fire. I read and re-read them by myself as well, but it was a family series for us for a long time. It was my first proper fantasy series, I think. Though Shannara was my first real epic fantasy series- I had read The Hobbit but not LotR yet when I got into them. Those were the books my grandpa shared with me- we have similar tastes in fantasy and sci-fi. Eventually we both stopped reading Shannara diligently (it got kinda repetitive tbh) I still think the world Terry Brooks built had very, very cool stuff going on.

However, my passion is Discworld. Terry Pratchett built the most beautiful and engaging world I’ve ever seen and he built it through his characters, who are human and unique and amazingly portrayed. Pratchett is often cited as “a cross between Tolkien and Adams” (really, “world like Tolkien and humour like Adams”) so Discworld is most often directly compared to Middle Earth. But I think the key difference is that Tolkien built a world and then set a story there, mostly to show off the world. Pratchett built the base of a world and let it develop alongside his characters. It’s a very different process- not to say that one is inherently better than the other, but you can very much sense the difference. Pratchett also has a charming wit- his books are all about playing with tropes and subverting expectations, parodying everything he feels like. He’s just made such a rich, diverse world that feels like it will keep on going long after the story ends. It’s beautiful and I love it and I will never tire of re-reading Discworld novels.
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