Fireflies! And more about those 100 books...

[altivo]

Saw the first fireflies of the year this evening, just after sunset. I believe they eat mosquitos, which is a good thing. They will not be going hungry.

Now, about that rather peculiar list of books that has been circulating as a meme. I agree with ruwhei that this appears to be the original source for it. However, it has metamorphosed as it was passed around online, and people have snipped away books they personally didn't care for in order to find room to insert some book or other of which they were enamored. This original BBC list makes a bit more sense, at least for UK readers. Notice that the list was constructed, at least in part, by taking public nominations or ballots.

[EDIT: 27 June, 10:35 am] Hot Flash! [Sorry, I've always wanted to do that.] My guess was not quite correct. Thanks to typographer the real source of the list has been found here. At least we know it wasn't from any of the "Big Read" projects. It was the result of an on-line poll taken in 2007, in the UK of course.

Clever filly that she is, Ru has also located a pair of rather more American lists, which spares me the trouble and hubris of making my own. Whether I agree with them or not, I'll leave it at that.

However, I'm now inspired to try something a little different. I'm going to construct a list of about 50 furry or anthropomorphic novels that I think every furry fan should have read. The requirements are:

• "Furry or anthropomorphic" is defined here as including one or more major characters who are sentient and (usually) communicative, who have the form of animals or can assume that form (transformation) or are hybrids or chimera that include both human and animal physical characteristics.
• Must tell the story from the viewpoint of the character or characters described above, or at least give them sufficient attention to merit inclusion here.
• Must be available in English, though it may originally have been written in another language.
• Novels, novellas, novelettes considered, but not short stories (less than about 30,000 words.)
• Graphic novels, comic books, manga, and visual media may not be nominated, though if they are based on a work of prose fiction, the original work is eligible.
• The target audience of the work should be ages ten and up (no picturebooks or similar materials.)

So, for example, classics like Bambi, The Wind in the Willows or Black Beauty are eligible. So are large modern works such as Watership Down and Pride of Chanur, and works that contain substantial anthropomorphic/furry elements or portions, such as Gulliver's Travels. Erotica such as Kyell Gold's Volle are eligible as long as they contain a substantial plot and character development.

Feel free to nominate your favorites in comments here, or through LJ messages or any other way you wish to use to reach me. I prefer that nominations be signed, but will consider anonymous ones. I'll tally up the results in no more than two weeks, and produce an annotated list explaining the source and the nature of the choices. Be sure to give me both author and title (if I can't identify the work you nominate, it may be dropped.)

Have at it!

Comments

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

I would like to nominate the following books:

William Horwood's The Wolves of Time series (two books: Journeys to the Heartland and The Seekers at Wulfrock).
Rutherford George Montgomery and L. D. Cram's Yellow Eyes
Michael Bergey's Coyote Season

I don't think I have to nominate Beagle's The Last Unicorn, do I? :P

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

The Wolves of Time series was amazing.

A trip down memory lane...

[merik.livejournal.com]

You got me thinking about what happened to my only real contribution to Furrydom - the Furry Novel List. I passed it on to its second maintainer in the late 1990s during a time when I was disconnecting from furry fandom, and I never really gave it another thought until tonight. Looks like the guy who took it over hasn't updated it since 2001, which is kind of a shame. Still, there are a lot of good books on there :-)

Re: A trip down memory lane...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That's an excellent list of the classics that have stood up through the years. Thanks.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Then entire Queen City Jazz cycle by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

Theres a reason she got awards.

It doesn't get anthro until the last book, but its worth
the ride. Usually SF is either old school hardcore Star Trek,
or the current PC stuff. The Queen City Jazz cycle will
seduce you in to a world, literally, beyond your imagination.

If you have to go through it to get to the furry part, you'll
be very happy for the ride.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

"Beyond Infinity" by Gregory Benford.

This is a bit of a departure for him, but its amazing.

The furry is a Raccoonish sort named Seeker. You really
end up loving her and she turns out to be...well, far FAR
more than the average furry.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

There's some suggestions at Ursa Major Awards... though I don't know how many stand the test of time.

[ysengrin.livejournal.com]

The Architect of Sleep by Steven R. Boyett (first book of a series; the second is written but not published and is in limbo)

The Weigher by Eric Vinicoff and Marcia Martin

Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon The Deep

[jairus-greywolf.livejournal.com]

I'd recommend "Startide Rising" by David Brin for it's underlying theme of genetically "uplifted" animals for your list.

Although this doesn't meet your requirements, "Dog Day Evening" by Spider Robinson features Farmer's Ralph von Wau Wau the German shepherd detective in the 2nd installment of his Callahan's series. I have yet to read any of the original Ralph von Wau Wau stories by Philip J. Farmer though.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I really like Ralph von Wau Wau as Robinson depicts him. I've never been a fan of Farmer, and didn't realize that the character originated there.

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

Ooh, someone mentioned Brin before me!

I've read his first three Uplift Universe books - Sundiver, Startide Rising and The Uplift War - and while the first only counts if we're including formerly-non-sentient aliens as animals, the next two are solid talking-animal fare and great reads.

I must read the next three soon.

[brokkentwolf.livejournal.com]

I haven't even seen Junebugs this year and we're almost to July. Fireflies are some of the things I miss about the east coast.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You're right. I did notice a Junebug buzzing against the screen last night, but it didn't dawn on me that it was the first of the year, and it was. Some years we get hordes of them, some years we hardly see any.

[dronon.livejournal.com]

The Architect of Sleep by Steven R. Boyett. Although it gets harder to find used copies as the years go on.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

Saw the first fireflies of the year this evening, just after sunset. I believe they eat mosquitos, which is a good thing. They will not be going hungry.

That would explain why there are so many fireflies this year. Even with my extermination of mosquitoes by the thousands with the bug zapper (which I'm still having to clean out every day because it's clogged full by morning), I'm barely making a dent.

[silver-kiden.livejournal.com]

i don't know about you, but i couldn't stand the chanur saga. pride was alright, but i put it down not long after starting venture. it's just too choppy. now on to the recommendations! volle and pendant, of course, but my favorite by kyell has to be Waterways. and then i must recommend the Warriors saga by Erin Hunter. yes, i know that they are technically YA and teen, but i like them. also must recommend the Ultimate Dragon saga by Graham Edwards, though it's damn near impossible to find in the states. i had to custom order them from the UK! p.s. more bookpoints for doing this :p and where do i get the K-9 icon? (yes, i have recently become addicted to dr. who)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There's a link in my userinfo to the artwork source for the K9 mood set. You have to install it yourself, though, which is a rather tedious business. I have no way to make it generally available for people to use without installing it as a custom set.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

S. Andrew Swann's Forests of the Nights, Emperors of the Twilight and Specters of the Dawn

Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger and Quozl

Richard Adams' Watership Down

Paul Kidd's Mus of Kerbridge

Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

Kij Johnson's The Fox Woman

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

Aw, I was going to say this. Now I got nothin'.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

And I wondered occasionally if I was the only person on this planet who'd read Mus of Kerbridge XD

[nicodemusrat.livejournal.com]

You mentioned the main ones I had on my mind. Especially Rats of NIMH, natch. ;)

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Gary Kilworth's "Frost Dancers", or "Hunter's Moon" (American title: "Foxes of Firstdark").

[schnee.livejournal.com]

"Fangs of K'aath" by Paul Kidd.

[doug-taron.livejournal.com]

We've had fireflies at home for about a week now. Firefly diet is a bit of a mystery. The larvae eat small invertebrates- snails, earthworms, pillbugs and the like. Things are much less clear with the adults. Some people claim that they are insectivores, some that they eat things like nectar and pollen, and some claim that they don't eat at all (not all that uncommon in adult insects). We do know that some of them eat other fireflies. Certain females mimic the flash responses of other species, and lure unsuspecting males in to their deaths. These are know, somewhat fancifully, as femme fatale fireflies. They seem to be doing this more to acquire specific snti-predator toxins than for general nutritional purposes.

[tinbender.livejournal.com]

White Fang and Call of the Wild by Jack London.

I'll have to give it more thought and get back to you with more. I know I have some good ones in my fantasy/transformation library, although they may not exactly qualify as the best of the genre.

I would assume that books like The Yearling, while about animals, are not eligible since they're not from the animal's perspective, true?

I would also suggest that you give a little more criteria, or am I somewhat missing the point? I would assume that these should be books that help define the genre, are important in the genre, are somewhat ground breaking, and should be looked at as classics in years to come. Or am I off base?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You are very much on target for what I personally would like to list. "Anthropomorphic" meaning that we get either animals or animal-human chimeras ("furries") as acting, thinking, and usually speaking characters. The Yearling is a great book, but doesn't qualify. White Fang and Call of the Wild certainly do qualify. Transformation fiction is good as long as the transformation doesn't involve a complete loss of human sentience and sensibility. I'll see about clarifying more, though all the nominations made so far do seem to fit the criteria.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Additional definitions of "anthropomorphic/furry" now added to the criteria. :D

[typographer.livejournal.com]

owever, it has metamorphosed as it was passed around online, and people have snipped away books they personally didn't care for in order to find room to insert some book or other of which they were enamored.

I thought so at first, too, but that is not the explanation.

If you check this list, you'll find it matches. You're absolutely right that it is not the Big Read, it's from an online "poll" compiled for 2007 World Book Day.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1544033/The-top-100-books.html

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip. Information inserted above and credited to you. The list was sufficiently inconsistent that I knew it had to have been produced "democratically" by committee or poll, but you found the source. Now, I wonder what was the list to which the claim about adults not having read six books really referred. I have no doubt that any such list compiled by critics or scholars would get such a dismal score, as least in the US, but I'd like to know what the real list was.

[typographer.livejournal.com]

Hehehe, I'm a hot flash...

...of course, when I read that, I started hearing the Les Nessman intros from the old WKRP....

[murakozi.livejournal.com]

I don't know what it is about fireflies. Perhaps it's that they were always kinda nature's way of saying 'summer is here' when I was a kid or something. I love 'em.

They were all over the place in my old apartment complex. I remember, years ago, walking along, feeling something against my arm and instinctively swatting it, assuming it was a mosquito. Looking down, I quickly glimpsed a green/yellow smear on my arm that faded almost immediately. I felt guilty as heck.

Seeing them while riding the Governor's train back from the Kentucky Derby a few years back is still a fond memory.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid in Michigan, we never had them. However, by traveling only about 90 or 100 miles south to my uncle's house in Indiana, we would see them. He was a serious gardener with lawns and rosebeds all over, and the fireflies loved it. They were mystical and rare to me, because I only got to see them a very few times.

Then while I was an undergraduate at Michigan State University, they suddenly appeared there. Whether my childhood perception was just faulty, or the range of the firefly has shifted northward, I can't say. But it's certainly true that after that I would see them in Michigan, and they have been abundant here in Northern Illinois as long as I've lived here (31 years next month.)

As I think about it, though, Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha mentions the firefly, even though it takes place farther north, around the shores of Lake Superior. If that reference is accurate, then perhaps it was just the area of suburban Detroit that was lacking in fireflies, which in turn could have been due to air pollution which was pretty bad back then.

[murakozi.livejournal.com]

They were all over my old apartment complex, which had lots of huge old trees and was almost right next to a 500 acre park. My new apartment hasn't the trees and such the old complex did and I don't think I've ever seen a firefly here. I do miss them.

I think the mystical thing is a big factor in why I love 'em still. I'd look out into the twilight, see a brief flash, then try to guess where it would flash again. As it got a little darker, more would appear. It did seem almost magical.

[songcoyote.livejournal.com]

I would like to nominate Ringworld by Larry Niven, as I believe it to be the first appearance of the Kzinti. I would also like to include the rest of his Known Space books that include Kzinti, but I'll be happy if even one makes the list :)

Oh, and the entire Redwall series by Brian Jacques (but again we can just use Redwall as the focal point).

I had several others in mind but they have all been mentioned in other posts. If you want to know which (in order to get them "seconded") I can list them.

Light and laughter,
SongCoyote

[goldenstallion.livejournal.com]

Dear Rider.

All I can offer is that I have read most of the books on the list but years and years ago. For probably twenty five years I read two to three books a week until the cost of paperbacks skyrocketed. Mostly Sci-Fi but back in school and many years later many of the classics. Even worked my way through War and Peace, Tale of Two Cities, several Steinbecks, lots of Hitchcock and Steven King. Twain, Shakespeare, old Greeks and Romans and so forth and so on.

Thing is I have not actually read a book in ten or more years until recently I picked up one of Bear's books, Dun Lady's Jess and I am enthralled and can hardly put it down. Soon to finish and wonder if you have read it? Have many more here and might just get back into actual bookpage reading. Yes, I read a LOT on the computer, and there is nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing quite like an actual book.

Steed

[goldenstallion.livejournal.com]

Whinnyhi again.

Reading down through these comments. Good stuff. Ringworld was mentioned, a book I seriously wish a good film would be made of, along with Gaea and Rama for the Sci-fi.

Bear just handed me Fire Bringer. Gonna read it next.

Steed

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There are two Fire Bringer books. One is about unicorns and dragons, the other is about red deer. Since Bear gave you this one, I'll assume the red deer, by David Clement Davies I think. It's good, but it's also a political allegory about as light handed as a ton of bricks.

[dragon-moon.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I was going to mention the book about the red deer, but it's at home and I couldn't remember the author.

It's been years since I've read it, but I'm pretty sure that Jim Kjelgard's Haunt Fox was in the perspective of the fox. I loved that book when I was younger and need to track down a copy for my library. :o)

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

I'm meagrely-read in my quad dog classics, so I look forward to your list, especially if it's annotated.

James Herbert's Fluke. I recall this being very good and one I'd read again.

Top Dog by Jerry Jay Carroll. I don't recall this one clearly, but it's a humorous fantasy.

Witch Beast by Bernard King I mainly include as a joke - it's pretty bad horror, but does meet your criteria. Oh, and on the same note, Zoltan, Hound of Dracula was novelised by Ken Johnson.

You may or may not think Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant counts; it's probably the one with most screen time given to the werewolves. I found Gaspode and Laddie the most significant characters in Moving Pictures...

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine mentions the Lassie novelisations.

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

*fleeting addition* Not sure how I forgot these, but The Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Fox and the Hound.