BigWords

Is liking Nigella Lawson still a no-no? Um... Karen Gillan. Though everyone probably knows that already. Dawn French perhaps, though that isn't exactly weird.

Welcome to the BCF.

Welcome to the BCF. Awesome to see another insane collector join.

Welcome. You've seen the size of the later books, right? You'll be hard pressed to get through them all by the time Santa starts squeezing down chimneys.

Welcome to the BCF - I have lots of suggestions. If it is shock and awe you are after, then Chuck Palahniuk or David Britton more than fit the criteria.

A magnificent understatement. It could do with extensive editing. Here's my main problem with Rand - She drops off the main plot of her writing for extended and unnecessary authorial intrusions which exist solely for the purpose of expounding on her own political viewpoints. Not only that, she didn't even understand how her tracts affect the material nor her readers. She claimed in an interview that her beliefs were not based on any existing philosophical standpoints, yet she explicitly goes out of her way to link her works to contemporaneous movements which exhibit all the traits of Objectivism in varying degrees. The authors who took up her work and transformed it into the thing Objectivism became - which isn't entirely what she had in mind, remember - have had more effect on her standing that casual readers. Actually, there are a lot of people who just don't give a damn. Once you've read the same argument rephrased a dozen times, it gets tired and predictable. It isn't that I hate her writing, it's that - by the time I had read through the books - I was tired of hearing the same things time and time again. There may or may not be a point to the viewpoints she espouses, though the way she presents the material is incomplete without a strong reason to accept - without hesitation - what the characters say. They are mouthpieces for her in the form she uses, and that (when compared to the way certain other philosophy-heavy writers use metaphor to get across their views) is increasingly obvious the more you read. I may be in the minority on how boring I find the characters and plots, but I've read a lot of the material written in response to her as well as her novels. YMMV on the lasting impact of her work, but as an author - someone whose work entertains and / or educates - she is severely lacking.

Tag and Bink. Not a novel, though the best entry in the entirety of the Star Wars saga.

From a historical perspective, you might want to look into novels about The Alamo, or the Battle of Rorke's Drift, both of which events featured a group of individuals fighting against a much larger force. There are also several accounts of Custer's final days. Some zombie novels also feature this device - most cribbed from the plots of the Living Dead series, but there are many original plots in the genre as well, plenty of which have massive casualty lists.

Welcome to the BCF. I'm another Arthur Ransome fan, though tempered somewhat in that I never actually read his books as a child. I found out about his books from a back-page illustration / advert in a Palmer Cox collection many years after I should have been reading the novels.

First editions are special because they mark the first time a novel gets shown to the world, and thus they represent something greater than the novel itself. I have a bunch of Stephen King firsts, though first editions don't really account for any great percentage of my collection. I do like signed copies, however, and have gone out of my way to get signed copies from even lesser-known authors - it's the personalization from the author which makes it different from "regular" copies. Not sure what it says about my psychology, but one of my most treasured signed books is a collection of superhero titles which was signed by one of the contributors to another of the contributors - which means it has double-pedigree, having been held by two individuals responsible for the creation of the collection. Yes, I am incredibly pathetic...