What a neat thread – I found lots of good ideas for the next library trip, and also gift ideas.
It’s next to impossible to pick only five, but I can list my five right now at this moment, in no rank order. Of course, this could be different tomorrow.
I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith. A young woman writes about her life living in a falling-down castle, with her very eccentric family, in a small English town, in, ah, it must be just after WWII. Funny and romantic, if a little dated. The writing is charming beyond belief, this is a very well-crafted book, it makes one wonder why Smith didn’t write more (she also wrote the original One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which is a lovely book and not at all like the Disney version).
In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden. A chronicle of life in a Catholic convent. By all rights it should be more cloying than it is, but I’m endlessly fascinated by it. It includes all sorts of details about daily religious life, and the characters are extremely interesting. Sentimental, but who am I to turn down a good cry?
Tam Lin by Pamela Dean. Adventures that border on the fantastic at a small midwestern liberal arts college. It’s usually shelved with “Fantasy-Sci Fi” but not very much fantasy happens, now that I think about it, it’s mostly intellectual snobbery. It makes me wish my college days had been like that. College freshmen who get into fights by sneering Keats quotations at each other? That’s the fantasy part, I guess.
Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. It’s hard to pick just one Sayers, but I think this one is it. The usual mystery, this time set at a fictional women’s college at Oxford. Harriet Vane is endearing as usual. Peter Wimsey is dashing, as expected. It’s a bit dated – it’s quite a treatise on the “experiment” of higher education for women, thankfully that seems to have worked out for the most part. But it still manages to make me appreciate how difficult it was, not even 100 years ago, for women to achieve success in the academic world.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Boy, I love this book! It’s a page-turner. It is so goofy and so exciting at the same time, I’m very affectionate about this book. The fact that it’s about four guys, not three, and they’re not even technically musketeers anymore because they were disbanded shortly before the novel opens is just icing on the cake.
And I managed to keep it to five novels – not biographies, memoirs, children’s books, etc etc.
