#2, 4 and 17 for the Book Asks, please!
2. Top 5 books of all time
Of all time????? Sudjsjs did I read this before reblogging? What kind of special hell? I a not qualified to give a top 5 books of all time. In any capacity.
So I suppose what I will do is list some books that I connected with in some way. These books have changed the way I think. They have stuck with me. They shaped me.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde -- I've read this twice and I'm still chewing on it. I was hollowed out and shell-shocked the first time. The second was a different version of the manuscript and was much more enjoyable, but I also approached it much more academically simply because it was an annotated copy.
Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen and Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon -- These books both very much changed the way I saw what I was taught about American History. I cannot recommend these two books enough as a challenge to the dominant narrative about the ideals this nation was founded on, and how we got to where we are today.
Tithe by Holly Black -- I don't think that I would end up liking this book quite so much as an adult, but this book and the following books in the series were so important to me as a teen. There was this gritty edge to them that felt "real" to me, a sheltered suburban kid whose only experience was "home" or "school" or transit between the two. The characters were all misfits, but still deserved friendship and love and belonging, regardless of their lifestyle choices or lack of supervision.
It is really hard to end this. I want to name something not very controversial and just end it, like "The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis. It's not something I think about often or really made an impact on me, but is entirely demonstrative of the kind of books I read when I read a lot, before college happened. But this is mostly chosen because I do remember reading it and I know it's well-regarded by other people, not because I regard it well myself.
[LOTR could work here sort of.. I really like the world and it certainly means more to me than Narnia did... but I honestly cannot stand Tolkien's writing and so this would feel SO disingenuous, since my love for this world is nearly entirely based in the films. Sorry nenya)
Another option would be to name a book series that was highly impactful on me but that I would not recommend. Anne McCathry's DragonRiders of Pern is perhaps the first series I remember being into. My balsa-wood racer car in tech ed was designed to look like Ramoth. They were perhaps my first hyperfixation. If you asked me about them I would have talked your EAR off.
And perhaps, this being the internet, you will have heard of them. Because of DragonRiders of Pern AUs. Because... well. It's basically got a sex pollen scenario built into the premise of how dragons work.
Now this was fairly exciting to me at the age of ... summer of 5th grade (so like 9? 10?). We'd just had sex ed so I had a vague idea of what was happening for that bit, and there was plenty of other things happening in the books (fighting Thread--the mysterious scifi substance that is always the threat! time travel! politics! friendships! romance!) for me to be interested in. But also. Like any trope that lets you just pair people together, there are problems with the premise. And I was certainly not thinking critically about it at that age.
These are probably better books if you're not.. a child with a very high reading level that has been given a carte blanche at the library because you can use and understand big words in a sentence. I could probably recommend them on tumblr.com because theoretically the user base should be older than I was then (14 at minimum, right?). But at the same time I really did internalize a bunch of SHITE specifically because of books, and I'm perfectly happy to leave them in the past.
So I guess... you've got an "influenced hergan and hergan hated it in retrospect" book series and a "people like it and hergan read it at least" book series. Neither feel like they belong on the list. I don't know what else I'd try to add, though.
4. What sections of a bookstore do I browse
So I always visit the manga section in Barnes and Noble. Sometimes I'll also visit the board games, sometimes the classic lit, sometimes the cafe. I rarely go home from the book store with more than a bagle and pictures of the front covers of stuff.
The library will find me in stacks, will find me in all KINDS of nonfiction, will find me in classics, will find me in manga and light novels and tumblr-recommended fiction [like Hunger Pains or The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher, although both of those are titles I checked out and returned without being able to get myself to start reading. I hope to rectify that someday.] Unfortunately, I don't often remember to try to find the things I saw at Barnes and Noble at the library...
17. Top 5 children's books
This is even less informed than my top of all time. This is just the books I remember best from when I was a young kid. I suspect a vast majority are going to be Eric Carle 😅
This was many years ago for me, and I have done no child-rearing so...
The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Rainbow Fish, Brown Bear Brown Bear, Aesop's Fables, [I've run out of books I remember in that age group, so I'm just going to add The Magic Treehouse even though this is now a chapter book, and end it.]
