Top Ten Tuesdays: Top Ten Favorite Minor Characters

( you know... all those great supporting character or a VERY minor character that might have been only in there a page or two but had an effect on you)

Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly blogging meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Please visit the hosting blog to see more lists.

These are only the minor characters I could remember from off the top of my head, so if I were to do this list again it might look totally different.

This very nearly became a Terry Pratchett only list, but I was able to restrain myself (but only just).

In no particular order:

Fred from Anyone But you by Jennifer Crusie. The archetypal lovable ugly mutt with a personality.
Davy Dempsey from Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie. Sharp and dangerous and very probably a criminal but also a loving brother who will do anything to protect his family. I’m glad he got a book of his own (Faking It).
Jemmy from Viscount Vagabond by Loretta Chase. My favourite lovable urchin.
Greebo the cat from the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. He is such an epitome of evil felinity that it’s hard not to love him. My friend used to have a cat just like him: evil, smelly and crazy, and father and grandfather to most of the feline population in our village.
The Luggage from the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. I wish I had one.
The Librarian from the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. Ook, ook!
The Death of Rats from the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. He’s always there for the rats (and some humans), has strong opinions that don’t always agree with those of Death and acts as a conscience and guide to some of the characters. I’d like to think he came for one particular character from the Harry Potter universe...
Theodore from My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. Theo was an actual person, Dr. Theodore Stephanides, and a remarkable man:scientist, doctor, translator, historian and acclaimed poet. I would have loved to have met him.
Hagrid from the Harry Potter books. I actually did a random drawing here, between several characters. I expect to find him on a number of lists.
The bums from Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. A lovable band of rogues. The frog hunting chapter is one of the funniest passages in any book I have read.

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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