Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books I Read Before I Was A Blogger

Top Ten Tuesday is a regular feature on the Broke and Bookish blog. This week's list is a look at the  books I read before I started blogging that I count in my top 10.

I'm not really sure where to take this one. I've been blogging as far as a personal blog since about 1997, gbut only started writing in earnest about books and reading in maybe 2011. So I'm going with that second number, since the first would make forming the list VERY difficult.

1. The Waste Lands, Stephen King - My favorite book of all time, at this point in my life. I reread it regularly - just reread it last month as a matter of fact! I love the characters, love the setting, love the tension of many of the scenes, the only thing I hate about it is the memory of having to wait for 4.

2. Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynn Jones - not for Howl, but for Sophie and, to a lesser extend, Michael and Calcifer. I read the book because of the movie, and loved the book so much more than the movie. I loved the wonderfully practical and yet deprecating way Sophie looked at the world, and I loved the language. Wynn painted pictures with words.

3. Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavrial Kay - A love triangle? Usually a massive turnoff for me, but the way it was woven around a tale of love and loss and trying to find something to cling to in a world that feels like it's falling apart around your ears was incredible to me.

4. Candide, Voltaire - Satire is not always my thing, but the flow of this narrative just irresistably drew me along.

5. Watership Down, Richard Adams - A tale about a bunnyquest. Somehow, this always seemed more vibrant and harrowing and exciting to me than any number of lost princes on save-the-world quests. Everything seemed scary and their triumphs seemed all the more worthwhile for that fear.

6. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling - I know a lot ofm people hated this book, but for me, it was the one that most fleshed out  one of my favorite characters, Neville, and therefore positioned itself firmly at the top of the series for me.
 
7.The Last Unicorn, Peter Beagle -the atmosphere of whistfulness and a memory of things lost and out of reach permeated this story. Even as a kid, it left me with a bittersweet, melancholy feeling and a tendency to consider the meaning of immortality and of life. And you know? Even now, I can read this book and be left with that same feeling.

8. Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King - Another fantasy from King, but this one a standalone. I love his fantasy far more than his horror, and I think the only thing that kept this book so low on the list was that I wanted MORE from it.

9. The Perilous Gard, Elizabeth Pope - I don't often like romances, but at its heart this isn't really a romance, but a story about a young woman coming into her own, finding ehr own strength, and accepting romance as a part of it.

10.  Mattimeo, Brian Jaques - Yeah, yeah, Redwall, but before I found Discworld, the Redwall books were my brainless candy, the ones I read when I needed something unchallenging and comfortable but wtill with a little bit of excitement and fun (and food porn, yummmm),