This could turn into a meme. Or not.
May. 25th, 2006 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schemingreaderWhen you want to return to a work of literature, film or music to read, watch or listen to something cheering and uplifting...what are your top five choices? Or more, what do I care, there are no limits--just something that doesn't make you feel low and crummy, but good. It should make you feel good, like, I am proud to be a member of the species that made this stuff.
Fan fiction recs are welcome!
I'll start, leave me some comments.
1. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
2. the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian (though I'm doing it less often since I started writing fan fic about it. :( )
3. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (or sometimes some other Austen, that's the one I've read the most)
4. Ella and Louis Again (Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong)
5. collected poems of Kenneth Koch
etc. etc. Lay it on me. If you like to look at still pictures (reproductions, or in the local museum) that's good, too.
Fan fiction recs are welcome!
I'll start, leave me some comments.
1. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
2. the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian (though I'm doing it less often since I started writing fan fic about it. :( )
3. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (or sometimes some other Austen, that's the one I've read the most)
4. Ella and Louis Again (Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong)
5. collected poems of Kenneth Koch
etc. etc. Lay it on me. If you like to look at still pictures (reproductions, or in the local museum) that's good, too.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 12:20 am (UTC)2. The Jupiter Symphony, especially the last movement.
3. The last movement of the Choral Symphony.
4. Psalm 139, especially the King James translation.
5. Any of the following humor pieces:
"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" - Mark Twain
"The Night the Bed Fell" - James Thurber
"Rolled in Fine Bohemian Onyx, Then Vulcanized by Hand" - Bruce McCall
"Coyote v. Acme" - National Lampoon
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Date: 2006-05-26 12:24 am (UTC)Thanks!
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Date: 2006-05-26 12:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 12:33 am (UTC)And his 5th.
Mozart.
Pop from the 80's, 'cause I'm a dork.
I heartily second Ellid's 'The Night the Bed Fell".
Persuasion, by Austen
"The Curse of Chalion" and anything else by Lois McMaster Bujold
Going outside and sitting in the sun on some lovely soft grass.
Tira Nog's fiction.
Ellid's fiction.
Cleaning the house.
Baking, especially something that someone else really likes, so I get that moment of joy from having made someone else happily surprised.
I think I wandered from the prompt, but I'm that kind of a person.
*wanders back to writing*
Stasia
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Date: 2006-05-26 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 12:37 am (UTC)I, uh, spent at least an hour there, 'catching up'.
Thank *you*!
Stasia
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Date: 2006-05-26 12:57 am (UTC)1. Kathy Griffin - Allegedly (especially the part about Gwyneth Paltrow)
2. Bridget Jones's Diary
3. Rats' Alley, by
4. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
5. Peppy Euro-pop music. :)
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Date: 2006-05-26 01:26 am (UTC)1. Any book of the Miles Vorkosigan serie by Lois Mc Master Bujold. I don't count how many times I've read those books anymore. Comfort food at its best.
2. Amber serie by Roger Zelazny, likewise. I re-read Lord of Light by the same author also very often.
3. Coldfire trilogy by CS Friedman. It's so tempting to re read those books many many times, and I don't want to do it because I'm afraid when I know them too well I won't appreciate them as well.
4. Lions of Al Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay, which is certainly not without flaw, but which I love nonetheless
5. Left Hand of Darness by Ursula K Leguin... do I need to say why ?
Yeap, all Sci-fi or Fantasy books.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 01:46 am (UTC)And her characters are very delightful ^^
[pimp mode]The
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Date: 2006-05-26 12:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 03:31 am (UTC)1. Childhood books: Freckles, Secret Garden, Jane Eyre, Daddy-Long-Legs, Westing Game, Dogsbody, Wind in the Willows, etc. I need to get a copy of A Candle in her Room, though, that was one I loved....
2. Romances by LaVyrle Spenser. So shoot me.
3. Three Men and a Boat, because it kills me every time, the jokes! Brilliant!
4. Barbara Kingsolver, pretty much anything
5. Poetry anthologies: oh, anything, I get drunk on poetry....
no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 12:30 pm (UTC)comfort reads: the romance edition
Date: 2006-05-26 04:17 am (UTC)2. Jo Beverly's Devilish (the hero's a tormented control freak! :-) ...)
3. Stephanie Laurens's Bar Cynster series. Her heroes and heroines are passionate control freaks! :-) ..)
4.
5. favorite scenes from
Music:
1. Pierce Pettis - "You Move Me," "God Believes in You," and some others.
2. Handel - especially fast sparkly stuff such as Michaela Petri and Keith Jarrett playing his recorder sonatas, Rachel Barton playing his violin sonatas, Nathalie Dessay singing "Tornami al vagghegiar" in Alcina...
3. Monteverdi's Il Ritorno di Ulisse in patria, especially with Frederica von Stade and Richard Stilwell as Penelope and Odysseus
4. Madonna's "Like a Prayer"
5. West End Synagogue's Shiru L'Adonai on their Music City Shabbat CD. So happy!
6. Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road"
7. Peter Cetera's "One Good Woman"
8. Andrea Marcovicci singing "Dear Kitty" from Yours, Anne
9. Vaughan Williams's "For All the Saints" when performed by a choir and organist who don't turn it into a dirge
10. Sandra Bernhard singing Prince's "Little Red Corvette"
no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 05:16 am (UTC)The Yardbirds.
'For I will consider my cat Jeoffry,' Christopher Smart, from 'Jubilate Agno.'
The Chronicles of Clovis, Saki.
Between Pacific Tides, Ricketts et al., 5th Edition
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Date: 2006-05-28 03:18 am (UTC)A singer friend of mine sang that at a memorial service for a co-worker who'd passed away from breast cancer. She'd been a cat lover. It was really beautiful.
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Date: 2006-05-28 05:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 06:57 am (UTC)Mozart's A Little Night Music
The Weather Girls' It's Raining Men
There's Something About Mary - especially the karaoke part on the DVD
Poetry by Erich Fried - read aloud to myself
Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 18 - read aloud to myself
Goethe's Prometheus - also read aloud to myself
I love rhythm, even when it comes to written art.
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Date: 2006-05-26 08:48 am (UTC)2. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
3. Kate Clanchy's poetry
4. The Collected Songs of Nina Simone
5. Edward II - Marlowe / The Changeling - Middleton
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Date: 2006-05-26 09:17 am (UTC)2. The Nina Simone Anthology disk
3. The Anne of Green Gables books
4. Tyger! Tyger! (It's Snape/Hermione and is hilarious. Well, not all the way through, but mostly)
5. Anything by the Dixie Chicks makes me smile
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Date: 2006-05-26 09:20 am (UTC)Howard Hanson's Merry Mount Suite
My own special mix of songs from musicals I like to sing along with
The Bach cello concertos
Everything's Eventual (short stories by Stephen King)
The Princess Bride
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Date: 2006-05-26 12:34 pm (UTC)* hums Storybook Love happily *
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Date: 2006-05-27 07:35 am (UTC)Bach Cello Concertos
*smiles in happy agreement*
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Date: 2006-05-26 02:50 pm (UTC)I second -- or third or fourth -- the recs for Bujold's Vorkosigan series. Marvelous stuff. Also:
1. Any movie by the Marx Brothers, especially Duck Soup. Hail Fredonia! This is so funny that it should be illegal.
2. Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection. Chabon's Sherlock Holmes' novella, a brilliant, touching story of Holmes in his old age and his strange connection with a refugee child in World War II. Among other things it is formally perfect, with an ending that made me gasp. Don't worry: he is not using that title frivolously.
3. Any movie by Hayao Miyazaki, particularly My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away. Amazingly visually inventive animation, with a quiet pacing, a sense of wonder, and a respect for childhood that's probably non-existent in American animated films.
4. Mark Doty's Firebird: a memoir. I love Doty's poetry; this is his luminious memoir of growing up gay in middle America.
5. Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet. A delightful movie, funny and moving and deeply affectionate. You could say that like his later Brokeback Mountain, it's about a gay couple's struggle to incorporate their love for each other and their love for their families, but this one comes to a far different and happier conclusion.
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Date: 2006-05-26 05:08 pm (UTC)I love Ang Lee's movies.
I have a lot of recs for things I don't know yet, and 500 people have recomended that I read Bujold. But this list wasn't strictly for me. I have a friend on my flist who needed things that are good art but cheering instead of depressing. Sometimes we get too caught up in the Romantic ideal of art that hurts.
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Date: 2006-05-27 07:34 am (UTC)Oh, I am so sick of the notion that something has to be tragic and painful for it to be high art, and that everything that is happy or feelgood must be trivial. Society should value happiness more.
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Date: 2006-05-26 08:24 pm (UTC)1. Anything by Terry Pratchett. Right now I'm reading Going Postal
2. The Moomintroll books by Tove Jansson. I have a special fondness for The Wizard's Hat and Late In November. The first one captures summer so well, while the other makes november a less ugly and raw month, giving it a silvery kind of beauty.
3. Granada's Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett. The attention to detail just makes me feel good.
4. Spirited Away, that animated movie about the bath house of the gods. It's so beautiful!
5. Letters From New York by Helen Hanff. I like the New York that she describes in that book, and would like to expreience it for myself someday.
This should be a meme
Date: 2006-05-27 07:31 am (UTC)ETERNAL FEELGOOD FOR THE SOUL
1. Mozart's Horn Concertos (bum tiddly bum)
2. Disney's Dumbo (makes me cry and then makes me happy)
3. Georgette Heyer - 'Cotillion' The quirkiest and most comforting romantic fiction ever, with a surprisingly non-standard hero who sidles into your affections.
4. Jack Vance - pretty much anything. He's the PG Wodehouse of Science Fiction, but with a sharper twist.
5. Jeeves & Wooster - TV Series - and while we're on the subject - Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie, perfection.
Re: This should be a meme
Date: 2006-05-28 01:04 am (UTC)I used to listen to Dumbo on an old vinyl record when I was a kid.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-29 07:24 pm (UTC)Consider my vote added to "The Night the Bed Fell". I'd also include "Other Alarms at Night" and "The Car We Had to Push" in the same collection.
I’ve returned again and again to E. F. Benson's Lucia novels, both to read and to listen to.
I like all the Peter Wimsey novels, but The Nine Tailors may be my favorite. I've read it twice and listened to the Ian Carmichael version at least a half dozen times.
I love the BBC radio version of LOTR like fire. Bill Nighy's the reason Sam Gamgee is one of my favorite fictional characters
Children's books: Kevin Henkes' mouse stories; The Wind in the Willows (reading it as well as listening to the Alan Bennett recording); Having a Wonderful Time by Tom Pohrt; You Can’t take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum by Jacqueline Preiss Weitzman; the Piggins books by Jane Yolen; The Dark Is Rising (the novel more so than the series as a whole) by Susan Cooper; and The Box of Delights by John Masefield.
To listen to: Britten’s Spring Symphony and anything at all by Dougie MacLean.