January Journal: Favourite fiction

[liv]

kerrypolka asked for my three favourite works of fiction (any medium)! I think it's a bit the nature of this daily prompt meme to encourage people to ask for favourite examples of something, but really when it comes to fiction I find that extremely difficult to do. Still, I'll give it a try.

It's a terrible cliché, but my absolute favourite book in the world is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. My dad read it aloud to us at the rate of one chapter per evening for what seemed like forever, when we were really too young to fully understand the nuances but greatly enjoyed it as an epic adventure. I read it for myself as soon as I was old enough to spell out the vocabulary and get some kind of gist of the sentences, but probably not actually old enough to read for comprehension. And then I kept reading it again every few years, appreciating different things about it at different ages. It's very unusual for me to reread anything at all, and it's really only LotR that I've read often enough to feel like I really know it well. Even so I keep finding something new in it.

As a child I was firmly convinced that Merry and Pippin were girls, and no amount of male pronouns changed my interpretation. I think partly because I was so used to children's fantasy with two boys and two girls going on adventures, E Nesbit, CS Lewis, Arthur Ransome etc. I also thought for a long time that the hobbits were children, because I didn't really understand the setup or the background about coming of age in the early chapters, and because the hobbits seemed to fit into the same niche I was used to seeing literary children occupy, they had a degree of autonomy that wasn't quite plausible for real world kids but which I took as a literary convention rather than seeing them as actual adults, but they also didn't really know what was going on and had to keep deferring to more powerful and wiser people, yet were able to save the day in the end. I related strongly to Pippin, though my most loved character was Sam. I had a phase of getting really excited about the linguistics, and as an emo early teenager (when my favourite book was A Tale of Two Cities) I loved the poetry. When I was in love I noticed the romances (in spite of many years of being grateful that this book was a refuge from icky kissing and marrying stuff). I do love the mixture of epic language and really believable human characters. I've found the overall arc both nihilist and uplifting at different times. When I'm having an especially hard time emotionally I find myself with nightmare-visions of Mordor, and (partly because I don't read much horror) I still find the drums in the deep the scariest scene I've ever experienced.

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kerrypolka specified that any medium is ok. Honestly, I can't think of any film whatsoever that I love as much as my top ten or top twenty or maybe even top 50 books. My favourite computer games are things like Civ II and Terraria, which don't really have enough plot to be described as fiction. Are there plays I love? I feel a bit disloyal not choosing a work of Shakespeare as my favourite, but I think my favourite play in the world is Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. I've reread it many times, not quite as often or as recently as the Tolkien, I know chunks of it by heart, I have a long-running and not very feasible project of writing a verse translation. I've grown out of it a little bit now, but I used to make a point of going to see every possible production, and I used to regularly cry buckets at certain scenes, particularly the closing scene Je n'ai jamais aimé qu'un seul être et je le perds deux fois. I don't think I've ever otherwise experienced that sort of deliberate, cathartic weeping that is almost pleasurable. Because it was so special to me for such a long time, I am still very fond of it even though I no longer love it as much as I did for its own sake.

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I've been thinking about this prompt for several weeks and really really struggled to come up with a third. There are lots and lots of books I really like, but I can't bring myself to pick one over the others. I think if I go for a book that's been a big influence on me and that I've read lots of times and analysed in detail, the third slot probably goes to Genesis. I mean, it isn't only fiction, but part of why it's special to me is as a story. My bat mitzvah Torah reading was the beginning of the Abraham story, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about and discussing Abraham's life and doings. I've been to any number of classes and seminars where various bits of Genesis are analysed, and in a way that's extremely unusual for me I've read a lot of secondary sources and commentary, both classical and modern. I think there's a lot in there that people can enjoy as literature without coming at it from a specifically religious viewpoint, but I doubt it would be among my favourite books if it didn't happen to be one of the most revered parts of my religious scripture.

[January Journal masterlist. Anyone want the last empty slot?]

Comments

[kerrypolka]

Thank you for giving this list a go! I prompted "favourites" because (I think) lists are something you can spend as much or as little time on as you want, and can use to talk about either the specifics of the works and what you like in the category generally (or both!).

Cyrano is a great choice. I haven't seen a production in aaaages but it's such a lovely one.

I feel a bit disloyal not choosing a work of Shakespeare as my favourite

This is really interesting to me! Why do you think you feel like that?