The Orange-Fingered Dawn: If you were to go through the books on my shelves, you could easily spot my favorites. They're the ones that bear orange fingerprints on their pages. I tend to eat while reading—a bad habit from my earliest childhood—and only my favorite books have the privilege of being read while I'm eating my favorite snack food: Cheez Doodles.

For some time, it's bothered me that I keep reading—and Cheez-ing—the same works of fiction over and over. I'm not that flexible with my nonfiction preferences either, but my nonfiction reading's positively voracious compared to my fiction. Since I graduated college, I have, for the most part, only read and reread the same small handful of fiction authors:

1. J.M. Barrie: The Little Minister, Peter Pan (an incredible, multilayered, beautifully written book that everyone should read), and his plays, plus a number of other novels and books of essays that I read because I'm a completist but wouldn't reread.

2. G. K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday, the Father Brown stories, The Ball and the Cross, plus, as above, a ton of other fiction that's not as good.

3. Philip K. Dick: Most of his novels and all five volumes of his short stories. I haven't read any of the biographies of him, but would like to.

4. Hans Christian Andersen: All his stories (one of my favorites being "The Swineherd," which only takes about five minutes to read and is well worth it). Tried to read The Fairy Tale of My Life too, but it was surprisingly unreadable.

And that's really about it. I've read other works of fiction in the past five years that were fun while they lasted—Wuthering Heights, Shirley Jackson's short stories, Penelope Fitzgerald's Gate of Angels—but nothing that made me want to seek out other works by those authors. (I did also read the impressive Carrie Pilby, but there's no other work of Caren's for me to purchase—yet.) So I thought I'd put out a call to my friends and any lurkers who read this—can you recommend some good fiction for me? As you can see, I like fairy tales, but ones that are aimed at adults at least as much as children. I don't like historical novels, unless the plot and characters are fascinating. I don't like anything about war, or dysfunctional families. I don't like stories that celebrate crimes like adultery, murder, etc.

I do like stories that play with time, as well as ones that pose ethical questions. I like ones with characters that I care about and can identify with in some way. (I once had to stop reading the copy of Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief that a friend purchased for me because I couldn't take an entire novel of straight satire, with no sympathetic characters.) I do like humor, very much, if it's within the context of a good story (and not the irony-laden basis of the story itself).

So—got any ideas for any new (or new old) books for me to stain—I mean, obtain?
9:59 PM