Top Ten Tuesday: Best Bookish Memories

Top Ten Tuesday is a regular feature on the Broke and Bookish blog. This week's list is a look at the top 10 bookish moments in our literary lives (I could unfortunately only come up with 9). I feel I may have cheated a little bit in my list, but I'll leave that judgement ultimately up to you :)

1. I had the good fortune to be invited to Balticon some years ago by a friend who wanted to go and listen to Neil Gaiman, one of the guests, speak. Now, travesty of travesties, at the time I had never read any of his work. But even if I had, while I find Gaiman to be a technically amazing writer, his stories just do little for me emotionally. I was thinking about saying yes anyway just for the experience, but then I glanced over the rest of the guest list and saw Peter Beagle was also going to be in attendance. Suddenly, I was VERY interested.

We got to listen to a very interesting Q&A by the pair of them together, then went and got in line for autographs. When I got up to the front of the line, I had only a copy of Tamsin in my hands so, to the somewhat amusing surprise of some of the other people in line, I offered a polite wave to Mr .Gaiman and went directly over to Mr. Beagle, who was in the second seat at the table. He was not the first author I've met in person, nor the last, but I think he may have been the nicest. He saw I was a little tongue tied, so he signed the book and asked how I came to be a fan and told a story about the writing of Tamsin.

I was walking on air the rest of the day :)

2. Midnight release of the fifth Harry Potter book. I'd never done a midnight release party for anything besides movies before. the energy was incredible, as was the knowledge that the people around you were all fans of the exact same thing so you could geek out to your heart's content and no one would give you That Look. It was all I could do when I got home to tamp down the energy of the evening and go to sleep.

3. Getting my hands on the fifth Dark Tower book. After the long breaks between books and then the accident, I had sort of thought that it would never come to pass that I'd be able to move with the characters of the Dark Tower books past the end of Wizard and Glass. While I would not characterize any of the 5th-7th books as among my favorites, the ability to finish that journey was incredibly satisfying.

4. Peter Beagle again! He came to Otakon one year. While the animated Last Unicorn movie is not really a book, I was a fan of it because of the book. The con played the movie on a big screen, and Peter Beagle had a microphone at the front and told all manner of stories about the book itself, the process of getting it animated and the people he worked with. It was incredible. (As was meeting him afterward and being treated to stories about his time in Japan during the making of the movie.)

5. My first library book sale. I was just little at the time (maybe first grade?), but I still remember that I was given a small amount of money (50 cents I think) and told I could pick out books on my own. I looked around and it just hit me in a weird way - there were so, SO many books out there, and I could choose to read whatever of them I wanted - it was completely limitless. Of course, at the time, I wasn't interested in anything without pictures, but the principle stands. :)

6. Reading "The Long Walk" for the first time. I have no idea what it was about that book, but when I finished it, I was left with this weird, profoundly sad feeling. We were driving to Kentucky at the time, and I remember looking out the window and thinking how weird it was, all those houses we were passing had people in them who were living lives that I would never know anything about, that would never contact mine in any way, and they were probably facing the same sorts of disappointments and loneliness and everything else that I did. And even though that really has nothing to do with The Long Walk, I still get that feeling to a lesser extent every time I read it.

7. Getting the first volume of "Crimson." I knew of comics as something that nerds in movies read sometimes, but I'd never really had any contact with them myself. But I was deep in a vampire phase and the story sounded interesting so I picked it up. That book opened up the world of comics to me, and I'm now a very happy comics fan.

8. The first time I had a chance to read a published book by a friend of mine. I actually get this happy feeling every time someone I know gets published. There's just something about looking at the author's name on the cover and having a wealth of personal experiences and good times to remember with them.

9. The first time I got positive feedback from a comment I made on Jim Hines' blog. I respect him very much as both an author and a person, and while it's a totally small and simple and human thing, it gave me quite the little thrill.