(no subject)

If you're wondering when I'm going to get bored of guessing-game memes - nevah! Or, right after this one, I promise. From pearl_o:

1. Choose five of your all time favorite books.
2. Take the first sentence
of the first chapter and make a list in your journal.
3. Don't reveal the
author or the title of the book.
4. Now everyone try and guess.

I don't have my top 5 at hand but these are all from the top 20, anyway. One is a non-fiction book.

1. This is where the dragons went.
Guards, Guards by Terry Pratchett
Not my favourite Discworld book, but my favourite of the ones I have to hand, and I really like that opening line.

2. If I'm to be regarded as an authority on anything - and I hope that one day I am - I would guess it would be on the subject of flatmates.
Are You Dave Gorman? by Dave Gorman and Danny Wallace
Dave Gorman's a standup comedian who makes a drunken bet with his flatmate that he can find 52 people with the same name as him. His quest takes him all over the world and cheerfully blundering into the lives of lots of very confused Dave Gormans. One of the funniest books I've ever read, especially because of how it's constructed, with the two of them writing alternating chapters, Gorman full of childish enthusiasm and Wallace as his long-suffering straight man.

3. Red sees the corpse's feet as he walks in the door. [I will be astonished if anyone gets this, which is why I've left the character's name in.]
Messiah by Boris Starling
quinn222 has astonished me! This is your standard cop/serial killer mystery thriller, with lots of brutal inventive deaths and religious stuff. Sort of a British Silence of the Lambs. The TV version's excellent.

4. [Name] gets me a job as a waiter, after that [Name]'s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you're thinking of vampires.

5. Once a term the whole school went for a walk - that is to say the three masters took part as well as all the boys.
Maurice by E.M. Forster
I first read this after I found it in my secondary school library. I think I had it out all through my sixth form (got asked more than once in the Prefects' Room how I could *bear* to read about the OMGev0l gays). Got the movie on DVD a while ago and was beyond thrilled to find that Merchant Ivory more or less filmed the whole thing as written and then cut about an hour of it, so there were scenes I loved from the books that I finally got to see.

(no subject)

The problem with my new layout (apart from it being impossible to look at if you're on dialup, for which I ashamedly apologize) is that it has so many clicky bits. I'm very lazy, too lazy to hoke through my bookmarks every time I want to look at something, so I'm dumping my links onto the sidebar. I'm also a bit obsessive-compulsive, so if *one* of the ships in the list has a link, they all have to have one.

For something as easily distracted as me, this is a Bad Thing.

*wonders if anyone outside her hometown actually uses 'hoke' to mean 'search through something'*