Tag Archives: favorites

Top Ten TV Couples

21 Nov

Angie posted this meme earlier this week, and how could I resist? Compile a list of your top 10 favorite TV couples to share. These are in no particular order.

1. Josh & Donna, The West Wing

2. CJ & Danny, The West Wing

3. Bartlet & Abby, The West Wing

What West Wing fan didn’t feel all warm and fuzzy when Josh and Donna finally became a couple? I love watching the banter, the way they know each other so well, and the way neither lets the other get away with any crap. They can make each other laugh, and they are always there when needed. Josh is brilliant but arrogant, and a good friend; Donna is gullible yet savvy, smart, and can see right through him. A good tv couple, in my opinion, has loads of tension and what-if build-up. And two characters who challenge and complement each other.

And that’s why two more of my favorite couples also come from West Wing. CJ and Danny circle each other more obviously, maybe, than Josh and Donna, but the connection is still complex. And they are still two smart and funny people who get each other.

Then there’s the President and First Lady. Some of the best scenes in the show are when they’re fed up and yelling at each other, because it shows a strong relationship many years in, and with many problems and strains. They push each others buttons, but they, too, know that underneath everything is support and strength.

4. Veronica and Logan, Veronica Mars


This clip says it all, doesn’t it? Epic, volatile, dangerous, yet also vulnerable and sweet.

5. Rory & Jess, Gilmore Girls

Jess might be my favorite tv bad boy. He’s always been my favorite of Rory’s boys. He’s smart and is a reader, so can meet her on an intellectual level, but he challenges her goody-goody nature. And he just always kept coming back. In my mind, at the end of Gilmore Girls, Rory went off with Obama’s campaign, saw Jess during a stop in Philly, and they live happily ever after.

6. Ally McBeal & Larry, Ally McBeal

The favorite TV couple from the college years. Robert Downey, Jr. playing Larry completely won the hearts of me and my roommate. He and Ally are just so adorably crazy, in such compatible ways.

7. Scarecrow & Mrs. King, Scarecrow & Mrs. King

How can you not love an ’80s spy couple?

8. Roger & Joan, Mad Men

They’re funny, they’re challenging to each other, and they always know where the other stands. And who doesn’t love Joan?

Bromances. Sometimes the best couples are friendships rather than romances.

9. Seth & Ryan, The O. C.

I never really watched much of The O. C. because I couldn’t stand the girls. But every once and a while I’d turn it on and would be totally charmed by the friendship between Seth and Ryan. They’re hilarious, and such terrific friends.

10. Stefan & Damon, The Vampire Diaries

They so often make me laugh! I think their banter may be one of the main reasons I have gotten so into this show.

This may be a reach.

21 Oct

So. I’ve had Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” playing continuously in my head since last Thursday.* (Thanks, Vampire Diaries.) In pondering why it’s so catchy, I realized that the refrain has something in common with another song that often gets stuck in my head, “Ultimatum” by The Long Winters.

Now, I know that the main reason these songs are earworms** has to do with the music. But both also involve the idea of reaching and holding.

Ultimatum:
My arms miss you
My hands miss you.

Enjoy the Silence:
All I ever wanted,
all I ever needed,
Is here, in my arms.

Maybe this also has something to do with why they stick in my head. The concept of reaching out and holding and connecting. It’s such an important part of life. And is it perhaps also why book jackets with images of hands are so compelling and appealing?

Or is that a crazy theory?

——

* There may also have been some secret apartment singing and dancing involved.
**I hate the word earworms. I can’t believe I used it.

A few favorite places

24 May

My absolute favorite place in anything I’ve ever read is the Murry’s kitchen in A Wrinkle in Time. There is something so warm and inviting about that kitchen. From the very first time we go there, with Meg, to have hot cocoa with Charles Wallace and her mother. The way the family gathers there, the way they–and we–all know that Mrs. Murry always has dinner cooking on a bunsen burner in her lab next door, the way that adventure also begins there. For we first meet Mrs. Whatsit in that kitchen, too. It’s a comforting oasis in the middle of a dark and stormy night.

There are a lot of other places I love in literature, too. Thinking about all of them, I’ve realized that they generally have two things in common. Either they are the places where the characters gather with their friends and loved ones, or they are the places where they go to be free and entirely themselves. As a kid, I definitely had a soft spot for any story in which the character had a place of his or her own–a place no one else knew about and was completely his or hers. It seemed so . . . luxurious, and even a little illicit.

My list of favorite places:
* The Murry’s kitchen, from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time
* Mary’s secret garden, from, well, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden
* Mandy’s cottage, from Julie Andrews Edwards’s Mandy
* Miss Honey’s cottage, from Roald Dahl’s Matilda
* the room with the wardrobe and Mr. Tumnus’s house, from C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
* the Garland’s house in Bloomsbury, from Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke and The Shadow in the North (which made the end of the latter heartbreaking for so many reasons!)
* Gryffindor common room, from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books
* the Dancing Dove, from Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books
* Terabitha, from Katherine Paterson’s A Bridge to Terabithia
* the truck in Lynne Rae Perkins’s Criss Cross
* Beauty’s room, from Robin McKinley’s Beauty

What are yours?

I love a good book meme.

20 Apr

1. What author do you own the most books by?
I think it might be a tie between Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley.

2. What book do you own the most copies of?
I have two of a few books (“good” copies and lending copies). But I get attached to the copy I read (yes, I mark my favorite lines/passages, and sometimes write notes in margins), so I don’t usually feel the need to buy multiples of books.

3. What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
I’m not very secretive at all about my fictional crushes, as evidenced by my previous post about them.

4. What book have you read more than any other?
Well…the books I’ve edited. But besides those, probably Matilda by Roald Dahl, Beauty by Robin McKinley, and the aforementioned Alanna books.

5. What was your favorite book when you were 10 years old?
See last answer. That’s why they’re the ones I’ve read most!

6. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
I was very disappointed by Breaking Dawn, I must say.

7. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
You mean besides the ones I’ve worked on again, right?

I loved Graceling by Kristin Cashore, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Paper Towns by John Green, Asta in the Wings by Jan Elizabeth Watson, Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta, The President’s Daughter by Ellen Emerson White, and Spook by Mary Roach.

8. If you could tell everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Oh, my. Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins or Megan Whalen Turner’s books.

9. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
Hm. That depends what “difficult” means. Ulysses by Jame Joyce was one of the most challenging books I’ve ever read, but it also teaches you how to read it as you go, so I never felt overwhelmed by it, and it’s so, so, so rewarding in the end. The first Octavian Nothing by M. T. Anderson was the hardest for me to get through because it’s just not the book for me.

10. Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
I feel pretty indifferent to both, actually.

11. Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Shakespeare. I’m a theatre dork.

12. Austen or Eliot?
Austen.

13. What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I’ve got big gaps in my reading of the canon. Like, I’ve never read 1984, Catcher in the Rye, Kurt Vonnegut, On the Road…

14. What is your favorite novel?
For reals? I can’t answer that.

15. What is your favorite play?
Hard one! Reckless by Craig Lucas, Private Lives by Noel Coward, The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard.

16. What is your favorite poem?

Many of a college friend of mine, who is yet to be published. I love very short, evocative poems that capture specific moments and feelings.
17. What is your favorite essay?
I don’t know that I have one, though I quite like reading them.

18. What is your favorite short story?
I adored Karen Russell’s collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

19. What is your favorite non-fiction?
Dear Genius, edited by Leonard Marcus.

20. What is your favorite graphic novel?
I’m not widely read in graphic novels, but I really liked American Born Chinese and To Dance and Robot Dreams.

21. What is your favorite science fiction?
The Hunger Games

22. Who is your favorite writer?
Way, way, way too many to try to pick one. Writers are tremendously creative and talented and amazing people.


23. Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
I’m not a Dan Brown fan, but plenty of people are. I don’t like calling writers overrated. They work so hard, and there are so many readers with such widely varying tastes.

24. What are you reading right now?
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.
25. Best memoir?
I can’t remember the last memoir I read!

26. Best history?
I have to be honest, I don’t enjoy reading history. I like biographies, and nonfiction in general, but history often is presented too dryly for me. I’d love suggestions for one that I might like, though!

27. Best mystery or noir?
The Westing Game

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