Two Posts in One Day? EGAD MAN!!

I stole a Facebook status from a friend today that required me to list 15 albums in 15 minutes. Not in any particular order - just whatever came to mind first. Seeing as how everything at the forefront of my brain was anime-related, such as Bleach OSTs 1, 2, and 3, Bleach Beat Collections 1, 2, 3, etc (there are like 50 Bleach-related albums...no joke), The Jill Decoy Association from Red Garden, Yoko Kanno from just about everything (Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, Macross Plus, etc, etc, etc), I forced myself to take a minute to think of something normal. The list I came up definitely revealed my eclectic tastes, even minus a single classical title (although I did think of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, which I adore, and Ave Maria as sung by Christina England...which was used in the game Hitman Blood Money (which I also adore)).

This prompted me to think about what book titles would first pop into my noggin if I did the same thing. Seeing as how I like to write, I thought seeing this list might reveal my influences. So here it is, 15 books in 15 minutes:

1. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
4. Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss
5. The Magic Cottage, James Herbert
6. Tales of Terror, compiled by Alfred Hitchcock
7. Dracula, Bram Stoker
8. Vampire Hunter D: Twin Shadowed Knight, Hideyuki Kikuchi
9. Of Mice and Men, Ernest Hemingway
10. Black Rainbow, Barbara Michaels
11. The Witching Hour, Anne Rice
12. Magic Elizabeth, Norma Kassirer
13. The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
14. The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451 also came to mind, but I already had two Bradburys on the list)
15. The Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King
Honorable mention: A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry

Yes. You did see Dr. Seuss and Poe on the same list. Don't gouge your eyes out. I imagine that might hurt a bit.

I grew up reading and, in my teen years, took as many literature classes as possible, so books like The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Great Gatsby, and Of Mice and Men, and others, like The Old Man and the Sea, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Beowulf, had a great impact on me and my perception of writing. Now that's not to say that I didn't also read Sweet Valley High, The Babysitter's Club, or any R. L. Stine book I could get my hands on. As a kid, The View From a Cherry Tree, A Wrinkle in Time, and Magic Elizabeth were my favorite books. As I got older, I began reading V.C. Andrews, which, really, once you've read one of her books, you've read them all. Just rename the characters and move them to a new locale. But I loved to read and would go through a book a night...so I read them all - at least until the writing team that was hired to continue the late Ms. Andrews' books began to lose her writing style. I digress. As much as I loved (and still love) the literary greats (back to Poe & Hemingway here, not Andrews ^_-), a lot of those books were chosen for classes and read for report writing. Even a teenager who loved to read would find that a chore. So in my down-reading-time, I selected titles by Mary Higgins Clark, Barbara Michaels, Agatha Christie, and Anne Rice. I also read Ellery Queen and other mystery compilation magazines. Heck, when Harlequin came out with their mystery romance line, I even started picking those up. I was hungry to read just about everything I could (should I note here that I worked in a library for four years?). I gravitated mostly to mysteries, with or without a romantic twist, but also sought non-fiction, reading everything I could about anything that interested me. While I may not read as much as I used to, I still carry at least one book around with me everywhere, and I can say that looking back at the my list of 15 and my life in books, I truly see how my writing style developed the way it did. If you think I'm going to explain that, sorry. That's a whole 'nother post.

If anyone is surprised by the lack of manga titles, fear not. I purposefully left them off. And before anyone cries foul that Vampire Hunter D made the list - while the series does come in graphic form, my collection, and the specific book I mentioned, is a true to life novel with words and everything. ^_^ However, should I be tasked with 15 manga titles in 15 minutes...well, I would cheat, because they are right above my head. But since the question was posed...I suppose I could oblige, and in order of preference, too...

1. Vampire Hunter D (but wait! It's a novel! Well yeah, but it does have illustrations and it sits with my manga collection, and I do have one of the graphic novels (even though I'm not a fan of them). I'm cheating anyway, so what'd you expect?)
2. Bleach
3. Vampire Knight
4. Hellsing
5. Loveless
6. Trigun Maximum
7. Trigun
8. Descendants of Darkness (please finish the series, Yoko Matsushita-san!!)
9. Sailor Moon (technically comic books, but whatever)
10. Cowboy Bebop
11. Blood +
12. Gravitation
13. Tenchi Muyo!
14. Captive Hearts
15. Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles

That's only a list from what I own. There are many titles I'm interested in reading and many of them would bump several off the preferred list (Please Save My Earth, for example - loved the DVD, but a lot of the story was lost in the transformation from paper to animation, and the story left me wanting so much more that I researched the background and fell even more in love with it. I cannot wait to add these to my collection, but that is going to take some time).

What would you come up with if asked to name 15 books in 15 minutes? I welcome anyone reading this blog to post their lists in the comments section.

Cheers!