Favourite AND Best: DWJ

[intertext]

Pursuant to my earlier post about best and favourites of children's lit - everything I wrote about there I read as a child, and, indeed, began reading at or before the age of seven. One author that I did not discover until I was in my late teens or early twenties, but whom I have continued to read and delight in ever since is, of course, Diana Wynne Jones. I feel as if I am part of an exclusive club - Those Who Know How Great DWJ Is!

Thus, I was thrilled to see Neil Gaiman's tweet this morning, announcing the lovely article about DWJ in the Guardian Book Blog. You can read it for yourselves, so I won't discuss the contents, except to say that she talks about how wonderful DWJ is and how difficult it is to choose an all-time favourite.

I have no difficulty choosing an all-time favourite ... well ... almost no difficulty ... maybe it's a tie. I think, if I were tied down and poked with sticks, I would plump for Fire and Hemlock as both my favourite and undoubtedly her best. I love it for its complexity, the dense intertextuality, the lovely relationship between Tom and Polly and indeed the unusual for DWJ emphasis on close human relationships of all kinds. And I've never found the ending ambiguous at all (but then, I'm a hopeless romantic and an optimist).

But, as a close second, by only a shade of a whisker, is Howl's Moving Castle, which for me is the ultimate comfort read: funny, irreverent, romantic, charming ... what can I say?

And then there's Dogsbody, with its remarkable presentation of the dog's point of view. And Time of the Ghost, and The Homeward Bounders, which I think is possibly my THIRD favourite DWJ book, maybe. But that would mean that I'd be leaving out Charmed Life, which was the first of her books that I read but still one that I love. Or The Ogre Downstairs which still cracks me up.

I can't wait for this summer's conference - All DWJ All The Time! What could be cooler than that?


PS: I need a DWJ icon.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I so very much wish I could be at that conference.

I pretty much have a set of four favorites, and have given up on ranking them: Fire and Hemlock, Howl's Moving Castle, The Lives of Christopher Chant, and The Homeward Bounders. With others running close behind, like Eight Days of Luke, which was my first introduction to Norse mythology and permanently warped my view of Loki. But if I had to pick one, like you, I would go for F&H, because that's the one that made me become a writer.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

I think those would be my top four, too, substituting Charmed Life for The Lives of Christopher Chant (which I obviously need to re-read: I wonder if so many picked it because they read it _before_ CL, whereas I read them in publication order). I'm glad to see another vote for The Homeward Bounders which is also one of my all-time favourites even though I find the ending terribly sad.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I definitely read TLCC before CL. I also just like Christopher better, for some reason, though I couldn't put my finger on why. It might have something to do with the latter portion of the book, after Gabriel gets blown into pieces. Cat gets to protag fairly heroically at the end, but he doesn't get to run things in the same way; once he frees Chrestomanci, the adults take care of a lot of the threat for him.

(I also love Millie. And Tacroy. And Throgmorton -- OMG, love on Throgmorton.)