The Best Books

My mind is occupied to-day with some things I can't write about at the moment. So here's something I made yesterday after I saw Caitlin R. Kiernan had posted her top ten favourite novels. I thought I'd do the same but some of my favourite books are poems, not novels. So I'll just say top ten fiction books. This is my current list, subject to change, of course:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Beowulf, author unknown
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett
She by H. Rider Haggard

The list is in alphabetical order, it's not a ranking. Books that almost made the list were Moby Dick, Treasure Island, On the Road, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. It seems slightly odd, maybe, to have Roderick Random on the list and not Treasure Island but I asked myself, "Which book did I compulsively read repeatedly?" All the books on the list are books that I could not resist reading multiple times, books that demanded repeat reading. In the case of The Bell Jar, I remember reading it immediately after I read it the first time. While Treasure Island may be objectively a better book than Roderick Random, Roderick Random was the first book, or, really, the first piece of media I was ever exposed to that felt like it was being honest with me about what it takes to pursue a career as a young man. I'd say it's as true now as it was in the 18th century.

X Sonnet 1982

The friendly shades would tell you many names.
You see the shadows cheap across the train.
One circuit holds reflective little games.
The human mind becomes the human bane.
Now other folks are boarding metal doom.
The vet'rans know the demon sprites and mesh.
The imps were real, the Cyberdemons loom.
But no-one trained, no player equals Thresh.
A vanished art of PVP returns.
But helpless mortals fall between the cracks.
Confusing books and ammunition burns.
So gleeful goblins stuff you up in sacks.
For scores of years, the world now changes hands.
And no-one sees the ghosts that roam the lands.