(no subject)

Keeping up the tradition started with heres_luck, brought to my little corner of the internet by the lovely and talented melymbrosia and upheld by countless others, my Ten Most Influential Books list. Balanced heavily on those I read before the age of ten, which, I suppose, makes sense, as those were formative years and years I was likely to be Influenced, and, plus, I'm not nearly as good a reader now as I was then. That, or the books got worse. Jury's still out.

But then, no one around these parts ever apologized for being heavy on the YA fiction indulgences, and I think that goes hand in hand with fandom -- see also schuyler's recent poll.

Here's the first.

The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster. I had the old silver-foil copy, but a hundred or so readings in the silver'd all flaked off, and I'm willing to bet I ate more than my share of it, chewing it off my fingers while I read. SKL and I were Rhyme and Reason for Halloween way back when, but I think I was always drawn to the Azaz/Mathemagician end of things (early predecessors to a Londo/G'Kar infatuation?). I had the abridged version on LP and used to listen to it as I drifted off to sleep-- there was a time I could recite, word perfect, the first sixty or so pages because I'd picked them up, osmosis style. Once, there was a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself. When I was in high school I did a summer program at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, Norton Juster's home town. One night I stopped by the local bookstore where a nice woman drew me a map to the man's house, and I walked over, crumbling silver-foil book in hand. He answered the door in a tanktop, chicken leg in one hand; I'd caught him in the middle of dinner. We stood on his porch and talked a long while in the summer dark with the crickets; I showed him the flecks of silver foil on my fingers.