Book Recommendations

On the Mythgard discussion boards for the Modern Fantasy class, one student asked the rest of us for book recommendations, specifically one life-long love and one recent fave.

This is, of course, utterly impossible.


The closest I can get to a "life-long love" is to list some long-term favorites that have (for me) stood the test of time:

• Nostalgic early favorites: Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak); Surprises!; One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (Dr Seuss); Elidor and the Golden Ball (Georgess McHargue).
• Favorite books since elementary school: The High King (Lloyd Alexander); The Spirit of Jem (PH Newby); The Silver Chair (CS Lewis).
• Favorite books since junior high or high school: The Great Divorce (Lewis); Something Under the Bed Is Drooling (Bill Watterson), The Essential Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson), basically any Calvin & Hobbes collection.
• Favorite books since college: The Cyberiad (Stanislaw Lem); the essay "On Self-Respect" from Slouching Toward Bethlehem (Joan Didion); the essay "On Chasing After One's Hat" (GK Chesterton).
• Favorite books since law school: Black Hearts in Battersea (Joan Aiken); High-Spirited Rose Is Rose (Pat Brady); The Girl in Blue (PG Wodehouse) and many, many other Wodehouse stories (I love the Blandings stories, but despise the Jeeves stories).

I also love and have re-read numerous times the Lord of the Rings trilogy, although I can't bear to put it in the list above for some reason.  Nor can I put any of my favorite Shakespeare plays in there either.  Not sure why.  

There are a lot of other books which I liked a lot at the time and place that I read them, and some of them are still quite good (or even better) on re-reading... but they don't have the same emotional pull on me.

The closest I can get to a "recent fave" might be better titled Books I've Liked a Lot Within the Last Year But Will Probably Not Read Again.  In this category, I'd put The Red Pyramid (Riordan), Hunger Games trilogy (Collins).