OHGOD

[highlyeccentric]

Nearly done. Books all on shelves. And they fit in more-or-less reasonable order. My personal categorisation techniques leave much to be desired, but oh well... There's one half-shelf which is more or less 'Women, 1880-present'. Thus we have Letters from Louisa next to Marie Stopes, next to a couple of random biographies and a book on women and religion in the eighties, and a bit further along we have Drusilla Modjeska next to an autobiography about life after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and next to THAT the Generic Puberty Guide I had when was pre-pubescent, followed by Baghdad Burning. The other half of that shelf is ostensibly Modern Literature from Jane Austen to Alex Jones, via Edgar Allen Poe and Brokeback Mountain...

On the up-side, the self above that is a lovely sweep of the English Language from Beowulf to Shakespeare, excluding Arthuriana and including (for lack of anywhere better to put them) a couple of non-Arthurian Old French texts. Followed, appropriately, by literary and historcical commentary from 'The Celts in Europe' to 'Feminism and Renaissance Studies'.

Also, I found a small heap of books I haven't had out for... six? ten? years. Including, much to my dreadful delight, Ann M. Marston's The Western King, responsible for my first encounter with Magic Psychic Fantasy Sex. I started re-reading it, naturally, and, with the added insight of four years' medieval studies, am intriuged. What I'd taken for straight down the line Celto-fantasy is in fact Celto-Saxon Fantasy, with a full complement of Vikings, Scots and inexplicable Romans, all under thinly veiled pseudonyms. Given that it's about a Magic Prophesied King Uniting The Land Against Either The Not-Vikings or the Not-Romans or both, I would put it on the Arthurian shelf, except that there's no space since I put Narnia in Tolkien and the Mabinogion.

Comments

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

LibraryThing?

*hint hint*

:P

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

EFFORT.

no.

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

Short and to the point :P

[anachronisma.livejournal.com]

Haha, my bookshelf is also arranged a little oddly... we have Tolkien and Lewis on one shelf (OTP?), because my Tolkien collection isn't big enough for a full shelf, a shelf that is "English history AND literature till 1650" with history on one side and literature on the other (the history side looks bigger, which isn't my fault, my medieval texts are all sized like paperbacks, and history books tend to come in tradeback size) which also harbors my collection of poems, some of which are not English but rather Russian, a shelf that you might call "Arthurian and Sailing" because the Arthurian books are oversized, and the seafaring books belong to my brother (various things there; some Napoleonic, some golden age of piracy, one about Elizabeth's seadogs), another shelf which is "fiction, religion, languages (teach yourself Latin and Russian guides), and herblore", which is largely populated by my collection of Terry Pratchett, and finally a shelf which is "knitting magazines and DVDs".

A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do to make all those important books fit. :)

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

Arthuriana+Sailing = OTP?

One day I will Dewey code all my shelves. But that would mean things like not having Tolkien's 'On Fairy Stories' next to the rest of the Tolkien, and it'd mean shelf breaks in the middle of series... WOE.

[tarimanveri.livejournal.com]

OMG, The Western King! That was my first encounter with Magic Psychic Fantasy Sex too! And Magical Warrior Soul-Bonding. Don't forget the Magical Warrior Soul-Bonding... it wasn't ALWAYS the same as the Magic Psychic Fantasy Sex. I'd forgotten all about it, and I had a really hard time finding those books once I discovered the first one, so I may have vaguely thought I was the only one!

I even realized it was Celto-Saxon-RANDOMLY EVIL!Roman fantasy at the time, I think.

The sad thing was that I could never get the third book in the second trilogy. The second trilogy wasn't as good as the first, but MAGIC PSYCHIC FANTASY SEX. Plus, they still had to free the island from teh Ev0l ROMANZ...

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

MAGIC FANTASY PSYCHIC SEX. (Far better than Telepathic Sci-Fi Sex or Telepathic Dragon orgies, thank YOU Anne McCaffrey...) Oh, definitely, Magic Warrior Soul Bonding had a huge formative influence upon me and my terrible youthful compositions. An overdose of Magic Warrior Soul Bonding (Marston, Douglass, who else was there?) is responsible for my love-hate relationship with the Amazing True Destiny Bonding Slash sort of genre...

I missed the Saxon part. I think I thought the Saeseni were Saxons, as opposed to Not!Vikings. Anyway, now that I know about Anglo-Saxons, and more about Celts, and many other exciting things besides, I'm stumbling across all kinds of hilarious things. I think Marston must've studied early medieval history or lit at SOME point.

On the other hand, thanks to fandom and just plain being more awesome than I was, I keep wanting to go through the book with a red pen - tighten this sentence up here, cut that one there, dear GOD improve your sex scenes...

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

There's a facebook group entitled 'Disney gave me impossible romantic expectations'. Dubious fantasy novels gave me REALLY IMPOSSIBLE romantic expectations...