Top Five memeage

[avrelia]

If you always wanted to know something about me, or just feeling curious or bored, there is this meme, and you can ask me my Top Five List of anything.

I may not have it, but you can still ask - maybe I'll invent one just for you!

In a more substantive stuff, I am in love with a book - Freedom and Necessity by Emma Bull and Steven Brust. It got me immediately when the characters started discussing Hegel - and then it was getting better and better: main characters I love, revolutionary underground, mystery and intrigue, Engels (actually as a character in the action), more Hegel with Kant and Hume, and the lovely XIX-century epistolary style.

The genre is impossible to define - it is not fantasy, not really a historical fiction or a philosophy textbook... But then, probably all really good book defy the strict genre definitions.

Reading about Engels - as the regular character - seems kind of strange. They (I rarely can think of him in singular, without Marx attached as a Siamese brain-twin, even though I read each of them) feel like a older relative - that you know were young and did what all humans do, but never think about it. they are way too memorial. And this is one of reasons I enjoy seeing Engels there so much!

But the main characters (Susan, Kitty, James and Richard are delightful, and I savor every moment with them, too. they are far from perfect - they have their quirks and vices and secrets, and they can be difficult, but they are never annoying and flat.

Comments

[swmbo.livejournal.com]

I raed Freedom and Necessity a few years ago and adored it. Sadly, I remember little about it now - just the feeling of how good it was. I'd read and liked Emma Bull before, but had read nothing by Brust and was just in love. (Sadly, Brust's other works never quite worked for me).

SO good though.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

Yes! So very good!

I've only read Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, and picked up the rec for this book somewhre in LJ, and I am so much in love! Everything is working for me in it.

[molly_may]

This book has been sitting on my bookcase for years, and I have never read it. And now you are one of two people (vonnie_k being the other) who has mentioned it this week. Maybe that's a sign that I should read it next.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

It is most definitely a sign. It is a delightful book. What else can get me so excited about Hegel? and it actually makes sense. And the love story is right. ;)