Archive for March 9th, 2009

09
Mar
09

70 Favorite Books: A Recap

By bittergrace Leave a Comment
Categories: favorite books

1. The Duino Elegies (Rainer Maria Rilke)
2. The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien)
3. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
4. Transformations (Anne Sexton)
5. The Time-Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
6. Stardust (Neil Gaiman)
7. The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle)
8. Possession (AS Byatt)
9. Smoke and Mirrors (Neil Gaiman)
10. Well Loved Tales (Ladybird Books)
11. Till We Have Faces (CS Lewis)
12. Howl’s Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones)
13. Sandman (Neil Gaiman)
14. Letters to a Young Poet (Rainer Maria Rilke)
15. 95 Poems (EE Cummings)
16. Lord of Scoundrels (Loretta Chase)
17. Beauty (Robin McKinley)
18. Dark Hours (Conchitina Cruz)
19. Winter Rose (Patricia A. McKillip)
20. Tam Lin (Pamela Dean)
21. Einstein’s Dreams (Alan Lightman)
22. Don’t Bet on the Prince (Jack Zipes)
23. Dreaming of You (Lisa Kleypas)
24. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
25. Fables (Bill Willingham)
26. The Seven Ages (Louise Gluck)
27. Romancing Mr. Bridgerton (Julia Quinn)
28. Twelfth Night (William Shakespeare)
29. Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare)
30. Watchmen (Alan Moore)
31. We the Living (Ayn Rand)
32. Persuasion (Jane Austen)
33. Twisted (Jessica Zafra)
34. The Rose and the Beast (Francesca Lia Block)
35. South of the Border, West of the Sun (Haruki Murakami)
36. Alone (Rod McKuen)
37. Atonement (Ian McEwan)
38. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
39. I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
40. Tales From Shakespeare (Charles and Mary Lamb)
41. Fourteen Love Stories (various authors)
42. Bluebeard’s Egg (Margaret Atwood)
43. Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmond Rostand)
44. The Hours (Michael Cunningham)
45. The Princess Bride (William Goldman)
46. Happy Endings (Luis Joaquin Katigbak)
47. One Hundred Love Poems (various authors)
48. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Pablo Neruda)
49. Eros the Bittersweet (Anne Carson)
50. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
51. The Beauty Myth (Naomi Wolf)
52. Spells of Enchantment (Jack Zipes)
53. The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (Will Cuppy)
54. The Bloody Chamber (Angela Carter)
55. Reconnaissance (Tara FT Sering)
56. The Virgin Suicides (Jeffrey Eugenides)
57. Psyche in a Dress (Francesca Lia Block)
58. The Mythology Class (Arnold Arre)
59. Fairy Tales for Adults series (Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling)
60. The Spanish Groom (Lynne Graham)
61. Bulfinch’s Mythology (Thomas Bulfinch)
62. Red as Blood (Tanith Lee)
63. The Rule of Four (Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason)
64. The Adventures of Tintin (Herge)
65. Self-Help (Lorrie Moore)
66. Wasteland (Francesca Lia Block)
67. Anne of Green Gables (LM Montgomery)
68. I Do (Elizabeth Chandler)
69. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 (Joss Whedon)
70. Smoke in the Wind (Robyn Donald)

ah ahm vahmpyrrr!

"Vous m’avez dit “Je t’aime.” Je vous ai it “Attendez.” J’ai Presque dit “Oui.” Vous avez dit “Partez.”" (You told me “I love you.” I told you “Wait.” I almost said “Yes.” You said “Go away.”) ~ from Jules et Jim by Francois Truffaut

Ayn Marie Dimaya: Fangirling since 2003

Bittergrace is derived from the hebrew variants of her first names: hannah loosely meaning "graced" and miriam loosely meaning "sea of bitterness".

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ongoing:
70 Favorite Albums

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Recent Viewings

Strings
(Anders Rønnow Klarlund, 2004
Mad Men Season 2
(Matthew Weiner, 2008)
G.I. Joe
(Stephen Sommers, 2009)
And I Love You So
(Laurenti Dyogi, 2009)
Bones Season 4
(Hart Hanson, 2008)
How I Met Your Mother Season 4
(Carter Bays & Craig Thomas, 2008)
House Season 5
(David Shore, 2008)

Recent Books

Skylight Confessions
by Alice Hoffman
Echo
by Francesca Lia Block
Verses
by Ani DiFranco
Changeling
by Kristin Cashore
Briar Rose
by Robert Coover
Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea
by Chelsea Handler
Fragile Eternity
by Melissa Marr

Recent Songs

Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves
by Seanan McGuire
(2008)

Wendy played fair, and she played by the rules that they gave her;
They say she grew up and grew old -- Peter Pan couldn't save her.
They say she went home, and she never looked back,
Got her feet on the ground, got her life on its track.
She's the patron saint priestess of all the lost girls who got found.
And she once had her head in the clouds, but she died on the ground.

Dorothy just wanted something that she could believe in,
A gray dustbowl girl in a life she was better off leavin'.
She made her escape, went from gray into green,
And she could have got clear, and she could have got clean,
But she chose to be good and go back to the gray Kansas sky
Where color's a fable and freedom's a fairy tale lie.

Dorothy, Alice and Wendy and Jane,
Susan and Lucy, we're calling your names,
All the Lost Girls who came out of the rain
And chose to go back on the shelf.
Tinker Bell says, and I find I agree
You have to break rules if you want to break free.
So do as you like -- we're determined to be
Wicked girls saving ourselves.

Alice got lost, and I guess that we really can't blame her;
They say she got tangled and tied in the lies that became her.
They say she went mad, and she never complained,
For there's peace of a kind in a life unconstrained.
She gives Cheshire kisses, she's easy with white rabbit smiles,
And she'll never be free, but she's won herself safe for a while.

Susan and Lucy were queens, and they ruled well and proudly.
They honored their land and their lord, rang the bells long and loudly.
They never once asked to return to their lives
To be children and chattel and mothers and wives,
But the land cast them out in a lesson that only one learned;
And one queen said 'I am not a toy', and she never returned.

Mandy's a pirate, and Mia weaves silk shrouds for faeries,
And Deborah will pour you red wine pressed from sweet poisoned berries.
Kate poses riddles and Mary plays tricks,
While Kaia builds towers from brambles and sticks,
And the rules that we live by are simple and clear:
Be wicked and lovely and don't live in fear --

For we will be wicked and we will be fair
And they'll call us such names, and we really won't care,
So go, tell your Wendys, your Susans, your Janes,
There's a place they can go if they're tired of chains,
And our roads may be golden, or broken, or lost,
But we'll walk on them willingly, knowing the cost --
We won't take our place on the shelves.
It's better to fly and it's better to die
Say the wicked girls saving ourselves.