EASILY AMUSED. Funniest complaint about comments-box fluctuations I’ve seen.

Shea also asks about favorite books (not “best,” but favorite). Here are mine. You will notice a distinct skew away from “best,” but not, I think, entirely leaving that high ground. In order of how fast I call them to mind.

Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Henry IV 1 & 2, and, like, pretty much everything else. Someday I’ll get it together to post my paper on Shakespeare’s “tragic sidekicks.” If I had to name five, and only five, other Shax. plays, I think I’d go with Lear, Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Macbeth, and Midsummer Night’s Dream. Maybe. Argh, maybe later this week I’ll try to post on why these plays in particular.

Diana Wynne Jones, Dogsbody

Michael de Larrabeiti, The Borribles and The Borribles Go for Broke

GK Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi and The Dumb Ox: St. Thomas Aquinas, in that order (remind me to tell you about the Hamlet/Francis parallel)

Ottfried Preussler, The Satanic Mill

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (esp. in Francis Golffing’s translation) and maybe Beyond Good and Evil

Oh! and how could I forget Stephen Fry, The Liar?

Or Donna Tartt, The Secret History?

Honorable mentions (books that strongly influenced me but that aren’t really “favorites”): Caryl Churchill, The Skriker

Edward Hale, The Man Without a Country

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (bet you weren’t expecting that one!)

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

That’s not counting all the supposedly non-literary influences like Alfred Hitchcock, though….