Yeah, Calvin & Hobbes are great! I have all the books. He seems to AS-like tendencies.
Hobbes has AS-like tendencies? (I assume you meant Hobbes because Calvin's a brat extraordinaire...) Sure, Hobbes takes things logically... but I always thought he was doing it on purpose, to tease Calvin. I don't think Hobbes is AS. Still, always the possibility that I'm missing the point - why do you think he
is?
If someone told me what Shawshank Redemption, or The Green Mile were about I would not have watched either one, but I love those movies!
I've seen both those films, and they are good stories (particularly Shawshank), but the violence in them is not good for me. I tend to fixate on that one aspect; it drives me mental because I start getting violent thoughts myself. Safer for me to avoid.
I'll have to check out some stuff from Phillip K. Dick. Thanks for the recommendation!
What are some of your all-time favorite books, if you don't mind sharing.
*laugh* I have a lot of favourite books! And I will be nice to you and not tell you anything about the plot beforehand. I'll just quote the first few lines of each (because that's hardly going to give anything away, it will let you get an idea of the style, and I prefer giving some sort of detail rather than a list of titles, so this is a compromise between our two preferences). I like a lyrical style, and all of these favourites are examples of this - in different ways.
My favourite book ever is Markus Zusak's
The Book Thief but I've heard that people have trouble reading the illustrated parts of it in an electronic form. (I don't know from personal experience because I like reading books as
books.) It is really,
really beautiful.
First the colours.
Then the humans.
That's usually how I see things.
Or, at least, how I try.
*HERE IS A SMALL FACT*
You are going to die.
I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. Please, trust me. I most definitely
can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.
Another one is Peter S Beagle's
The Last Unicorn - and quite a few of his short stories. This is my favourite author even though he didn't write my favourite book. Weird, no?
The Last Unicorn has been translated into a graphic novel, which perhaps you'd find easier (?), but I prefer the original myself.
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and her coat was no longer the careless colour of sea foam, but that of snow falling on a moonlit night. Yet her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.
And just to show you that Beagle's really versatile in terms of narrative voice, here's the beginning of his short story
The Last Song of Sirit Byar. And yes, I do still count this as lyrical - surprisingly - because it's so very fitted to the character.
How much? How much to set down one miserable tale that will cost your chicken wrist an hour's effort at very most? Well, by the stinking armpits of all the gods, if I'd known there was that much profit in sitting in the marketplace scribbling other people's lives and feelings on bits of hide, I'd have spent some rainy afternoon learning to read and write myself. Twelve copper, we'll call it. Twelve, and I'll throw in a sweetener, because I'm a civilised woman under the grease and the hair. I promise not to break your nose...
My favourite book when I'm looking for something hilarious is James Thurber's
The 13 Clocks, which is apparently a children's book but I discovered it in my early twenties and loved it anyway.
Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up things like pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales.
Anyway. Those are the sorts of books I'm into due to narrative style. There are several others I'm into because of narrative grip although the style's not lyrical (Gaye Hicyilmaz's
The Frozen Waterfall, for example, which I picked up at a second-hand book sale earlier this year without ever hearing of the author before), because of pure humour (Terry Pratchett, who manages to spoof anything up to and including
The Phantom of the Opera, cats in general, Death himself, and the continent of Australia)...
I just thought of a book you may be particularly interested in, given that you read
Lord of the Rings and Christian books. Fleming Rutledge's
The Battle for Middle-earth unpacks the Biblical principles behind
The Hobbit and
LotR. I really like it, in spite of Rutledge's dislike of the Peter Jackson films.
*sigh*. Guess what
my Asperger-fascination is.
Laughing is good!
