Questions from your comments – Part 2
Today’s topic: recreation! I should mention that these kinds of questions are precisely the most difficult for me to answer – while I have excellent sequential recall, remembering contextless names, artists and titles are tough.
favorite books?
Let’s go with books that have been my favorites, whether they are now or not:
Under Plum Lake by Lionel Davidson. This was my first chapter book. I still own it, and the first chapter has pencil lines under the words where my grandmother started reading it with me. After a few pages, I was reading by myself – this was some time before preschool.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. A great many geek friends consider this a holy book, and I am one of them. I picked it up when I needed it most, at nine or ten, and it helped me cope with a pretty rotten school experience. I greatly believe in the concept of knowing, and to some extent loving, your enemy. Even as you crush them. … Good times!
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. I found Heinlein in 4th grade, while I was roaming the library to avoid going out to play (those of you who’ve heard me talk about 4th grade understand). Conveniently, I started with Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, which was his youth-oriented book. I quickly ready everything I could find by him, and this book continues to be one of my favorites.
The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Six months later, at 10, my grandmother realized I was getting bored and had run out of books to read, and she gave me this. I put it under my bed for a month, and picked it up out of desperation… and was essentially inseparable from this book for years. It’s a 10-year-old’s adventure in an adult world… which was pretty close to how I felt, most of the time.
Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace by by Dan Margulis. This book is no fucking joke. It takes a lot of effort to wrap your mind around the concepts in the later chapters, and I am still, years later, going back to it in order to pick up some things. Want to make a tan person stand out from a tan background only using the Curves tool? If you do any color correction work at all, this book has deep, black arcane magic.
Looks like I can talk forever on anything, so those other favorites will have to wait. ;) Thanks for the questions!