(no subject)

Day 01 → Your favourite song
Day 02 → Your favourite movie
Day 03 → Your favourite television programme
Day 04 → Your favourite book
Day 05 → Your favourite quote
Day 06 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 07 → A photo that makes you happy
Day 08 → A photo that makes you angry/sad
Day 09 → A photo you took
Day 10 → A photo of you taken over ten years ago
Day 11 → A photo of you taken recently
Day 12 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 13 → A fictional book
Day 14 → A non-fictional book
Day 15 → A fanfic
Day 16 → A song that makes you cry (or nearly)
Day 17 → An art piece (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.)
Day 18 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 19 → A talent of yours
Day 20 → A hobbie of yours
Day 21 → A recipe
Day 22 → A website
Day 23 → A YouTube video
Day 24 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 25 → Your day, in great detail
Day 26 → Your week, in great detail
Day 27 → This month, in great detail
Day 28 → This year, in great detail
Day 29 → Hopes, dreams and plans for the next 365 days
Day 30 → Whatever tickles your fancy

This one is just impossible to narrow down, so I'm going to say my favourites in a few different genres. As an English major, I read a *lot* of literature throughout my academic career. My absolute favourite of these would be Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. It's a collection of short stories set in the aughts of 1900, in a town that was once important for it's placement on the railway, but is slowly dying. The stories paint small pictures of the towns inhabitants, described as "grotesques" in the prologue. It is a painfully beautiful book full of unrequited love, sadness, longing, and brief, blinding moments of truth. I won't say any more, because it should just be read.

Michael Cunningham's The Hours comes in second, and though it isn't my favourite, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is sort of essential reading to get the most out of it. I love fucked up characters and relationships, so it shouldn't be any surprise that I loved the weird romantic codependency between Virginia and her sister Vanessa, I love the entire character of Mrs. Brown, her cake, her infatuation with Kitty, her quiet, suffocating depression.

The next two are ones I'm actually re-reading right now, my favourite comedy -- Good Omens -- and my favourite post-modern, meta-textual horror fiction -- The House of Leaves. Good Omens is such a joy to read over and over. It's just as hilarious every time (what isn't funny about the apocalypse), and I find myself noticing things I hadn't before. I love every character in the damn thing, plus Aziraphale and Crowley OTP!

The House of Leaves is probably the creepiest thing I've ever read/seen/experienced. This book gave me nightmares. It's my favourite kind of scary, that slowly builds, never explicitly showing you why you should be scared, or of what. It's the terror of what's lurking, unseen, poised to strike should you turn around. There's a story within a story within a story, chapters that diverge from the main storyline to give history, mythology, and physics lessons, footnotes that go on for pages. Plus it's just visually stunning--the text is blue, red, and black, there are passages written upside-down, diagonally, in spirals, in blocks and circles. Danielewski created a masterpiece here, with hotlinks in the texts, with architectural text, created a house from the leaves of the book. And how cool is it that his sister, Poe, made her album "Haunted" to go along with the book. Even if you don't want to read it, you should look it up sometime.

Favourite fantasy would be His Dark Materials series, specifically The Amber Spyglass, though I love all three. The last, though it breaks my heart and moves me to tears every time (and kills most of my favourite characters), it's such a beautiful piece of work. Everything culminates so fantastically, the only fitting end to the journey that's taken place, and I love that we see how Lyra and Will have grown and matured, and I'm so fucking proud of them every time. I'd go more into how much I love it, but it would be boring and I have to get my nephew to bed, anyway. So. Yeah.

Runner's up include Sarah Monette's Melusine, Dicken's Great Expectations, and A Wrinkle in Time.