Holidailies Day 11: Ten Books

Well, I mean to do this yesterday, but my plans got hijacked by the Facebook post I ended up writing about. It's okay though. I'm not complaining. It was fun. And this will also be fun.

Over at the blog of the guy who invented Holidailies, Richard AKA Underpope (also one of the fabulous Municipal Liaisons for the Sacramento NaNo region) I found this post with one of those wonderful internet surveys that I used to eat up when I was in Jr. High/High School. It used to be passed by email, and then Facebook became a thing, and so it came to this. This one is thankfully less banal than the ones of yesteryear, otherwise I wouldn't subject people to it.

So here it is. The challenge is to list ten books that changed your life. The challenging part, at least for most people who are avid readers, is narrowing it down to only ten. Technically, I'm supposed to tag a bunch of people but I'm going to forgo that for this: If you want to have fun and be a cool person, you should do this. If not, you're still cool you just probably won't have fun with this. And now, without further adieu, I proudly present, in no particular order of importance... My Ten Books That Changed My Life:

1. Animorphes #1: The Invasion - K.A. Applegate wrote this amazing series of urban sci-fi books that really opened my eyes to a whole other genre when I started reading them at age 10, after years of Babysitter's Club and other more mainstream kid's lit. For the first time it wasn't just normal kids doing fairly normal things and dramatizing them. It was normal kids in a normal world (unlike the fantastical worlds of fairy tales or Narnia) being thrust into extraordinary circumstances and becoming extraordinary to match them. It gave me a whole new area of reading to explore, one where anything fantastical could happen.
2. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien is a master. My friend used to call him an insane genius, because he had to be both to create an entire world with histories and languages and every detail you could ever hope. I tend to agree, because WOW. Now, I do have a confession to make: I saw the Fellowship of the Ring movie before I read these books. However, I did read all three of the books, multiple times before Two Towers came out, so I feel that makes up for it. I don't even know what to say about these books other than they enchanted me, and continue to enchant me. I recently listened to all three of them in full on my iPod while driving for about two months straight. I would occasionally get so giddy over how brilliant they were that I would giggle and then be very glad that I was alone in my car. They're just that good.
3. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis became a part of my childhood when my father read the Chronicles to me slowly, but surely, before bed each night that he was home. Since then I've read all of them myself countless times, but those first readings still stick with me.
4. Alanna: The First Adventure - Tamora Pierce drew me in with one simple fact: Her heroine had my name, and more importantly SHE SPELLED IT CORRECTLY. When I was 14 and had rarely come across someone who could spell my name right on the first go, I was quite impressed and determined to read such a book. Add to that the fact that she was a ginger (something I've always longed to be), had purple eyes (one of my favorite colors), and was not content to be shoved into a girl's rightful place in a Medieval society, and I was hooked. I have a tendency to read through books that I get into in days, and to this day 10 years later, I can still blast through a Tamora Pierce quartet in a day or two. And still be astounded by how much I love them after so long. I DEVOURED her books when I first discovered they existed, and then made it a point to own all of them so that I wouldn't have to depend on the library whenever the fancy struck me. In fact, I just finished re-reading Bloodhound, the second of the Beka Cooper trilogy, which is definitely high on the list of my favorites though I still cannot find any heroine that I love more than Alianne, Alanna's daughter.
5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams sparked in me a massive love for off the wall, extremely dry humor. Or maybe more helped me figure out that this was really where my sense of humor was meant to be. This book (and the rest of the 5 book trilogy) had me laughing so hard I cried 99% of the time. And it was my inspiration for my first NaNo novel, and one of my favorite short stories that I've ever written, which definitely guarantees it a spot on this list.
6. Many Waters - Madeline L'Engle wrote many books that sat me flat on my butt in absolute awe. A Ring of Endless Light and A Swiftly Tilting Planet were in hot competition with this one, but Many Waters won out because of it's focus on something slightly less metaphysical, at least for me. The metaphysical is more mind-boggling. The retake on the story of Noah, on the other hand, took something that I knew from the cradle practically, and reshaped it into a story that seemed like it could have actually happened. Not that the original Bible story was unrealistic, but it did leave out a lot of details. Details that L'Engle filled in with such incredible skill that it became one of my favorite of all of her books.
7. Dreamland - Let me just preface this by saying I wrote my senior paper for my BA in English on Sarah Dessen, so I could (literally) go on for pages about any one of her books. They've been constant companions since I was 13, and like Tamora Pierce, I can re-read any of them at any time and find solace. But Dreamland is different from all the others. Dreamland actually really annoyed me the first time I read it. Actually, scratch that: it pissed me off. I wasn't expecting the emotional wrench that it threw into the works, and I swore never to read it again until I did my paper. It was then that I reread it, dreading it, and ended up falling in love. Because at the core, even with all the horrible scenes (especially the scene at the very end that makes me cry EVERY TIME), it's a book about identity and what to do when your identity is caught up in so many other people that you don't even know who you are anymore. And then how you deal with it when you finally see yourself and realize that you hate what you see. The end of the book, where Caitlin is finally herself and is okay with herself is the best redemptive ending of any of Dessen's stories, even if it is more subtle than the others. 
8. Virgins - The effect that this Caryl Rivers book had on my life when I first read it in high school is a little difficult to quantify. Despite never getting up to any of the hijinks that they did, I identified with the characters and their stories and their experiences growing up in a hyper-conservative religious culture. I recently re-read both this book, and the sequel Girls Forever Brave and True, and I think more than anything what it fostered in me was the idea that writing could be my out. My way of making my voice heard. And that as a woman, I could be a powerful person, changing the face of the world.
9. Harry Potter - I got the first book of this series when I was 11. My grandmother bought it for me while I was staying at their house in Lake Almanor that summer, and in the week that we both had it there, we both read it at least 3 times, trading it back and forth. It was that enchanting. It wasn't until I got home and my mother freaked out that I found out that there was a huge fuss happening over the books in the Church. Which didn't stop me from going to the library over the next few years and reading the rest of the books on the sly until I was 16 and finally convinced my parents that I wasn't going to become a witch as a result of reading the books. I could write a whole post about why I read them (and might at some point this month). But aside from that, I was of the generation of kids who more or less grew up with these characters. The way they were released, I was the same age as the characters all the way up until the seventh book when I was just a year older than them. It's one of those things that becomes part of your life. Funny story, I'm currently wearing a Gryffindor shirt that my dad picked up from a thrift store. 
10. The Bible - I would be remiss if I didn't include this on a list, because as cliche as it might sound, for me The Bible has been both the most constant and the single most life-changing book I've ever read. So much of my personal history is caught up in it, not just because I was raised with the desire and goal to know it better than I know myself. But I can tell you, having read through it cover to cover multiple times, that there is never a lack of new information, new revelations to be found. Or old revelations that needed to be re-found. It's a remarkable piece of literature, aside from it's sacred nature, and then because of it. 

Phew. That was a little longer than I expected. Though I don't know why I expected I could be concise about BOOKS and my favorite books no less. Oh well. Now I'm going to go... well, eat lunch and probably read. Because again, books. My favorites.