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Favourite books
There are books you read and enjoy once, and there are books (not always the best ones) that you go back and read time and again.
These old friends are often ones that really got you when you were young, and they're a warm friend to return to. Some books make it onto the list later in life, but they have to have something special to add them to that list. There has to be a comfort factor in there somewhere - the characters have to feel like people you know and want to spend time with.
Here's some of the ones on my list that have been re-read the most.
Heinlein gets three books on the list:
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - there for the culture that Heinlein creates on the Moon, the complex marriage arrangements caused by the far greater number of men than women, MIKE who was the first self-aware computer I encountered and still one of my two favourites (Anne Leckie wrote the other). Plus the whole against the odds rebellion against Earth and the way they go about it.
Double Star - An out of work actor agrees to act as a double for a politician who has been kidnapped just before a crucial visit to Mars. Pure character - the actor is completely a-political, hates Martians, but very, very slowly, comes to understand the man he is impersonating. My favourite scene in the entire book is when the King spots that he's a ringer. Why? Becuase the guy he's replacing had detailed records on everyone he had to meet, but didn't need any aid to remember the King. Our protagonist is polite about the monarch's model railway - which the original Bonforte thought was a silly hobby - and said so.
Citizen of the Galaxy - This wasn't a favourite when I was young. I always found the last section of the book to be a bit dull - the adventures cease and the bureaucracy begins. As an adult, I understand what is being said. Slavery is an evil that cannot be eliminated by heroics. To make any gains at all requires studying records, cash flow, ship movements, profits, etc.
Ursula le Guin - The first three Earthsea novels. Pure magic. But also with such understanding of human frailty. Ged's journey from brash young man seeking the power he can gain from magic, is a long, long way from the man he will eventually come to be. I lent this to a teenage friend recently, and was delighted when she said it was one of the best books she'd ever read. (she reads a LOT of books)
Francis Hodgson Burnett - The Secret Garden. Something to do with Yorkshire, gardening, robins and really lonely/selfish children (who annoy each other so much that they eventually start to mature) makes this a book I keep coming back to.
Lois McMaster Bujold - the Vorkosigan series. All of them. I have my favourites, but they'll all get re-read (yet again) eventually. Strong women, love that depends on so much more than good looks, politics, characters growing up over time and learning/developing as they get older. Space combat, laughter, friendship, the influence of one society on another. (One of the minor glories of this series, is that Barrayaran politicians (who tend to seriously underestimate women) fail to realise that letting the Regent's wife have a major input into the education of the young Emperor is bound to have him grow up with her political slant - which is far more broad-minded than that of anyone else on Barrayar.) Also, this series firmly plants its feet as LGBT positive. The novel where a character changes gender in order to cope with the Barrarayan political system is both hilarious (for the reactions of all the old guard) and endearing.
Lois McMaster Bujold - the 'Penric and the Demon' series. Hey, who wouldn't want to share their body with a two-hundred year old chaos demon and end up worshipping a god 'The Bastard' with a very warped sense of humour?
This is in many ways a very gentle series. Events are often small in the eyes of the wider world, but vitally important for a few individuals. The Gods are real in this universe, but they cannot intervene directly. to answer prayers, they need the aid of those who can hear/understand them. And those are very few in number. Souls are greatly valued. It is almost as important to save the soul of a recently deceased person, as it is to save a life. Sometimes fear/unresolved business/even a desire to accuse a murderer can prevent a soul travelling directly to meet its god. But if the delay is too long, the soul fades and becomes sundered.
Tolkien - Lord of the Rings. The only difference from enjoying it as a teenager, is that I get a lot more from the poetry now.
So, that's the ones that instantly come to mind - what are yours? And why?
I can see that character growth and a well developed background feature highly in why I like these books so much.
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Susan Cooper 'Dark is Rising' sequence. Rosemary Sutcliffe.
'The Voyages of the Limping Flamingo'. Charpoggy became a fixture in family terminology.
Hmmm, not sure what this says about off the top of my head lists!
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'Dark is Rising' was a read once for me, possibly because I encountered it much later in life. But Rosemary Sutcliffe is on my 'really must get around to reading' list. A lot of my friends like her. Which of her books do you like the most?
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"The Mark of the Horse Lord" and "Warrior Scarlet" are often cited. "Sun Horse, Moon Horse" got under my skin as a child. "Eagle of the Ninth" is a classic. "Simon" is about the Civil War (portrayed, unusually, from the sober Roundhead side).
She wrote two completely different sets of Arthurian novels, one of which is a chivalric version of King Arthur and his knights (e.g. "Tristan and Iseult") and one of which is a historical Dark-Ages depiction of post-Roman Britain ("Sword at Sunset").
"Lady in Waiting" is a novel about Sir Walter Raleigh but shown through the eyes of his long-suffering wife. "The Armourer's House" is an enchanting novel about children in Tudor London.
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Of the Sutcliffs I have a particular fondness for the Civil War books ('The Rider of the White Horse' and 'Simon') and the two just post-Roman ('The Lantern Bearers' and 'Sword at Sunset'). But I happily reread all the ones I have.
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(Probably to explore the Arthur legend as a whole, whereas "The Lantern Bearers" is a novel about the fall of Roman Britain, with the ongoing 'British resistance' more of a background thing to the protagonist's own personal story...)
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The Civil War ones are a kind of sequence but from very different viewpoints and centering different stages of the war. They're often indicated as standalones because of that. Best read in the order I gave.
Having said that, Simon was pretty well the first Sutcliff I ever read (I think I got it as a birthday present). Others were acquired at different times. So I've read books standalone, out of sequence, in unofficial sub-sequences, in sequence and in super-sequence (as a kind of history of Britain), and some I return to more often than others.
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I think Puck of Pook's Hill misses the mark a bit for me. it's rather a product of it's time. The heroes are too perfect.
But I will love the Just So stories until the day I die.
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I'm not sure that was assumed to be the case historically -- The Gunroom was definitely not aimed at children, although the protagonist and his contemporaries (who go drinking and whoring in the East, to authorial disapproval) are all sixteen at the start of the book and under twenty at the end of it. The author makes a point of talking about how young the midshipmen still are and how the Navy expects them to be serving officers at an age where they are barely men, but the book is clearly an exposé aimed at an adult audience and would probably bore children to tears.
I don't think "A High Wind in Jamaica" was intended as a children's book either, and I'd question whether William Golding set out to write "Lord of the Flies" for teenage boys, however often it gets prescribed on school curriculums nowadays (along with "Wuthering Heights"...) whereas the Just So stories, for example, clearly are fables aimed at the very young in their joy of language and patterning. And "The Jungle Book"; the intended audience is clearly older, but it's a myth written for the child's eye (which is why the final chapter showing an adult Mowgli viewed through the eyes of an adult outsider always jarred for me...)
Although that makes me start to wonder about stories like "The Ship that Found Herself", which has much the same 'mythic' properties -- in a way that I don't think anyone would write for adults nowadays -- but was originally published in a "gentleman's magazine" ("The Idler", edited by Jerome K. Jerome), and doesn't appear in collections of Kipling aimed at children!
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/the-ship-that-found-herself.htm
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Based on legends about why the area around Lake Buttermere doesn't appear in the Domesday book, and why certain landmarks have their names it still holds my imagination in thrall forty-five years later; second only to Watership Down in my personal all-time favourite books.
If it was the same size it would be in a tiny collection of books I carry around with me. My (twenty-somethingth) copy of Watership Down ~ I'd literally worn out sixteen copies of that book before I left school at nearly seventeen ~ Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey; incredibly still the copy I bought for the unimaginably expensive price of 25p! & The Final Reflection by John M. Ford; Star Trek novel written from the perspective of a Klingon.
Haven't read all of her books since they are almost impossible to find, except for The Eagle of the Ninth of course which, as much as I love that book too, is a tragedy to me since she's up there with the greats of English Literature; children's as well as adults.
kerk
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Have you looked online recently?
plenty second-hand on WOB, if you don't want to buy from Amazon - https://www.wob.com/en-gb/category/all?search=rosemary%20sutcliffe
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It's been a good long while since I've looked for secondhand books online; everything seemed to be owned by Amazon. I did mean on actual bookshelves; apart from The Eagle of the Ninth I don't think I've seen a Rosemary Sutcliff book in a bookshop since the days of the old fanrun cons when I use to go up to London once a month for the old 'tuns'; stayed with friends and went on book hunts.
I miss Gay's the Word and having lunch under the statue of Rabbie Burns!
Thanks for the link; I'll check it out. If nothing else it'll give me a good reason to organise my books so I know exactly which books I have.
kerk
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