Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

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Hoo, where to start, since I've been an avid reader since age two (Mom read aloud to me, up to and including street signs as she pushed me in the stroller)?? I'll try and keep the list short:

The Arch Books Bible stories series: lovely picture book retellings of stories from the Old and the New Testament, with very lively writing.

Father Lovasik's St. Joseph Picture Books, particularly the Lives of the Saints.

Fifty Saints for Boys and Fifty Saints for Girls: very cleverly written short stories about the lives of the saints; I can't remember the author's name, but she's a British writer with an almost Jane Austen-like gift of snark.

The Color Faery Books by Andrew Lang: I might be annoyed with the way he sanitizes and bowlderizes some of the stories, but they're still good to start kids on, just for the sheer diversity of stories.

Anything by Edgar and Ingrid D'Aulaire, especially their Greek Myths and Norse Myths

Beatrix Potter: 'Nuff said, particularly The Fairy Caravan, which was my favorite book as an eleven year old.

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, particularly the version with illustrations by Mervyn Peake: his drawings just add a whole new level of weird to the story.

Coraline, and The Graveyard Book, both by Neil Gaiman. More weirdness!

A Wonder Book by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Little Women, et al by Louisa May Alcott

Anything by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Anything by Lucy Maude Montgomery (which, if you really look at them, are darker than they seem...)

Anything by Anne Pellowski

The Redwall novels by Brian Jacques (Granted, his stories can be a little bit all of a kind, but they're still a lot of fun)

Anything by J.R.R. Tolkien. Even the Silmarillion. Really. Because every kid needs some Elf soap opera to keep their life in perspective.

The Vampire Academy books by Richelle Mead, once they're a bit older

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:: Points to icon:: This one, since it's got so many awesome characters in it and so many interesting riffs on mythology and legend.

I used to re-read Beatrix Potter's "The Fairy Caravan" in middle school: it's the longest and in some ways the weakest of her books, but it's still a sweet read with a lot of fun little critters.

Does re-reading the Gormenghast trilogy three times count as regularly re-reading???

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Mostly reality shows: TV court shows (which can sometimes have the most hilarious cases: watched one today involving a woman suing a guy for hard-selling her on some defective inflatable moonbouncy-things, like the inflatable castles you see at kid parties and some small carnivals), law-enforcement type things, ie. COPS, which my mother and I like to call "Stupid Criminal Tricks", due to the silly things perps will do to escape, like hiding under beds and in attics or in bushes to evade the police. Supernanny from time to time: some of the kids on there you just want to take over your knee and wallop.

Also, the DiC dub of Sailor Moon. I'm a die-hard watcher of dubbed anime, but that one is so bad, it makes me cringe from time to time.

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I ran across a list on Wikipedia of what are known as The Northanger Abbey Horrid Novels, the list of crazy-titled books which Isabella recommends to Catherine Morland, and that phrase "The Northanger Abbey Horrid Novels" just struck me as A Good Name For a Band. (Come to find out that the Horrid Novels are real books, thanks to the efforts of an enterprising British librarian who dug around for them, but I digress). They'd be a sort of tongue in cheek geek rock/goth rock band, something between Emillie Autumn and Oingo Boingo (when the lead singer isn't being an idiot between numbers and doing random bad impersonations of Tom Waits, or Till Lindemann of Rammstein). Their first album? "Mysteries of Udolpho". Cuts would include "Rats in the Basement, Bats in the Belfry", "Regency Twihard", "It's 1799, Do You Know What Your Daughter is Reading?", "Murk 'N Peek", and "Murdering Ye Oldie English" as well as covers of The Strawbs' "Lady Fuschia", Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party", Titus Groan's "In the Hall of Bright Carvings", and Emillie Autumn's "I Know Where You Sleep".

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Ooh... Would have to be "Winter Knight" by Nox Arcana. Gothic reworkings of classic Christmas carols, as well as a few original pieces. Their version of "Carol of the Bells" is hair-raisingly beautiful, and "Veni, Veni, Emmanuel" sounds exactly like it was performed by a choir of monks in a Gothic cathedral, even though it was recorded in a home studio by two guys!

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I'd go with the term "human companion". The term "guardian" carries the connotation of a legal guardian, ie. to a minor or a severely handicapped adult, and that's giving an animal a status that really doesn't fit. No matter how special an animal companion may be to a person who shares their life with them and regardless of how well-cared for that animal is, it's still an animal. No amount of love or care can change them into a human being, subject to the same rights and privileges as a human being.

Personally, I find the attempts to apply human rights to animals ludicrous at times. Would predatory animals be required to become vegetarians and be subject to prosecution for genocide against or murder of their prey?

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TVTropes.org. I have to stay Very. Far. Away from that site if I have fic to type or emails to reply to. I go on Wiki Walks there that turn into hikes through the Rockies. And don't get me started on the sheer number of times I find reasons to apply certain tropes to a certain series featuring sexy shinigami and a crooked energy vampire...

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Caution: contains some amount of ranting. This is a big issue full of triggers for me.

Emphatically *YES*. Not that kids should be sequestered away from "the birds and the bees" indefinitely, as some fundamentalist types would try and do, but there's just some things they don't need to see or know about until they've reached a certain age or they show signs that they're mature enough to handle it. And there's some things that people just don't want to see and should not have shoved in their faces if they don't want to view it. Case in point the guy with Asperger's Syndrome whom I de-friended, banned from my LJ and reported, since he inSISTed on posting lolicon and hentai doujinshi frames on his LJ, sans LJ-cut. Either one is a trigger for me, especially the lolicon: I have a family member who was sexually abused as a child and not a day goes by that I wish I could do something to take away her pain (including things that would require an LJ-cut for extreme violence. :: laughs:: ).

I tend to err on the side of caution in rating things, so what's PG-13 to some people would be a soft R for me, and what's R to some people would be an NC-17 for me. I think of rating systems as boundaries for what's acceptable content for a certain age bracket (calender age or emotional age: my mother jokingly says about R-rated movies, "Oops, that's too grown-up for me") and what isn't.

I don't think that requiring warnings, etc. would inhibit the creativity of any person with any amount of consideration for the sensibilities of their fellow human beings. If it's a deterrent, it makes me wonder if they were going for shock-value from the get-go. What people do in their own corner of the universe, behind LJ-cuts or closed doors, is none of my business, but once they pull it out into the open, where everyone from my mom's pen friend's ten year old grandson to one of my ninety-year-old customers at work to the nuns who go to Mass at St. Joe's in Lowell can see it, then it becomes a problem to everyone.

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Hm... Laundry list here, but I'll keep it down to three:

--The castrato Farinelli, who in some ways could be described as the Michael Jackson of the late 1700's and was a good friend of Mozart (enough that they called each other brothers);

--Mozart as a kid playing for the nobility;

--Antonio Vivaldi and the orchestra of the girls' school he was the music master for.

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Just watched "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (and in my world, the only one that exists is the Chuck Jones cartoon version), and I have to admit, it's one of my favorites, due in no small part to my love for Dr. Seuss and his oddball wit and also the fact that none of the stations in my area didn't air it for a good ten years: not sure why. Being deprived of it has made me jump at the chance to watch it when we find it on. I'm also a sucker for "A Christmas Carol" (the version with George C. Scott as Scrooge, the Muppets' version and the musical version with Albert Finney are my personal favorites). And of course, Christmas Eve would not be Christmas Eve without watching "It's a Wonderful Life" and putting the last touches on the Christmas tree. I have to admit to relating to George Bailey a whole lot: I might have big dreams, but circumstances seem to be calling me to serve in a smaller capacity than I would normally choose. (That and I have a bit of a crush on Jimmy Stewart).

And... "Nightmare Before Christmas". It's Tim Burton, it's stop-motion, it has black humor with a lot of goth overtones. You can watch it at Hallowe'en or Christmas. ...I need to get the DVD, stat.

Hard to say if I have any specials that I really dislike, except maybe this one a year or two ago that I can't remember the dumb title of; it involved some wonky-looking claymation anthro-reindeer (or CGI that looked like claymation) making lame attempts at (rather low) slapstick humor. One of the voice actors was Britney Spears... and her character was a female reindeer with rather obvious hoo-hoos. Not that hoo-hoos are bad things (far from it...), they just looked weird on a reindeer, even an anthro-reindeer. Might have just been the model or the way it was rendered, but it seemed like a bad attempt at fanservice. I ended up changing the channel.

I also have to be in the right frame of mind to watch "Miracle on 34th Street"; this probably stems from the fact that as a kid, I was scared of Santa Claus. I didn't freak out or anything like that, I just tended to freeze up whenever the Guy in the Red Suit was around. There's even this photo of me at age six sitting on the lap of a friend of a friend in his Santa get-up, and I look like a rabbit staring into the headlights of an on-coming 18-wheeler on a dark, icy highway. To this day, I am still agnostic about Santa (the Christmas Angel always brought presents to our house, and still does, in a manner of speaking).