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.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

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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