kothornoi

i'm so happy.

Is it weird that I was touched by being tagged for something like this?  O, well.  Here you go, demonbloodsausagedog.  Roughly in order that I read them.

Where the Red Fern Goes, Shiloh, The Education of Little Tree maybe this is kind of cheating, but a lot of my early reading was a lot of quintessential Southern literature.  i read To Kill a Mockingbird six times in school.  As I Lay Dying did something horrible to me.  it still haunts me.  but so does any and every stupid story where the dog dies.  stories like "The Scarlet Ibis."  what is it with Southerners and racism and tragedy?

Fiddler Fair by Mercedes Lackey this collection got me into writing short stories.  i read a lot of Lackey as a kid.  but this one i tended to reread.

The Metamorphosis by Kafka uh, what am i supposed to say here.  it's Kafka.  this was where the obsession with Prague started.  the tag for my Czech vampire lady is #Die Verwandlung.

The Dark Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop uuuuhhhhhhhhh, this one is vaguely embarrassing.  it's ridiculous romantic fantasy.  a friend in high school loaned it to me.  but...  no, i can't even defend this.  Jaenelle Angelline is the main female character.  The main male characters are Daemon Sadi, Saetan Daemon SaDiablo, and Lucivar Yaslana.  it's objectively ridiculous.  but it got me to think a lot about the power dynamics between the genders.  about portrayals of rape in fiction.

The Enchanted by Jean Giraudoux it's a french play about ghosts and love and death and life.  at sixteen, in Arkansas, i ate that up.

Medea as adapted by Robinson Jeffers i have a lot of feelings about Medea, and i have even more about this adaptation.  it stands in sharp contrast to Bishop's trilogy for me.  a woman cannot be broken by a man.  but she can break him.  or something...

Shelley's Poetry and Prose i'm pretty upset because i can't find my copy, but i read it first for a class and then would revisit whenever i was feeling sad.  poems like "Mont Blanc" are very soothing.  and Prometheus Unbound gives me chills.

Lord Byron: The Major Works same.

Satyricon by Petronius all them ablative absolutes.  o, i got very good at ablative absolutes and figuring out the structures of sentences.  only to throw that out with Catullus, but...  seriously.  it's a weird little book.  weird and homoerotic.

Beowulf mostly, epics aren't my thing.  but there's something sad and poignant about Beowulf.  probably that whole shift from paganism to Christianity, the end of an era, the death of a hero.  i like those things.