List Day

With my unfinished dissertation hanging over my head and Half at a standstill, I thought I'd go the easy, relaxing route with a blog post today. Lists. Three, to be precise. Great books that I think everyone should read or at least give a go; some of the best and most original story ideas I've ever heard of; and a list of some of my favourite fictional characters. I hope the first list, at least, gives people some fantastic stuff to dig into. I absolutely love having new, lovely things to discover, so I hope you do too.

Books

1. Daphne du Maurier, Frenchman's Creek
2. Daphne du Maurier, The King's General 
3. Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades 
4. Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
5. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
6. Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
7. Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
8. Gail Carriger, Soulless
9. Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart
10. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Ideas

1. Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series. Literary detectives who can wander in and out of fiction at will, and change classic stories. Brilliant, brilliant concept.
2. The Time Traveler's Wife. The time traveller concept has been done innumerable times, but this is one of those situations where the execution of the idea is the cleverer concept than the idea itself. There's a certain spark and magic about the way Niffenegger uses involuntary time travel and two perspectives to tell an emotional story.
3. The Graveyard Book. This owes an awful lot to The Jungle Book, but I think the idea of a little boy growing up in a graveyard and being raised by the dead and undead, is a fantastic one.
4. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Multiple worlds, armoured bears who believe their armour is their soul, and, above all, daemons. Daemons are a physical manifestation of a person's soul, and they take animal form and have personalities and voices. When you have a daemon, you're never alone. They have to be one of the loveliest and most gut-wrenching concepts in fiction. Who doesn't want one?
5. Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle. A burn victim receives a visit from a woman who claims she knew him in their past lives, and then proceeds to tell mesmerizing stories about love. Great idea.

Characters

1. Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights
2. Silas from The Graveyard Book
3. Owen Hunt from Grey's Anatomy
4. David Tennant's incarnation of the Doctor from Doctor Who
5. Hermione Granger from Harry Potter
6. Phedre from the Kushiel's Legacy series of novels
7. Artemis Fowl from Artemis Fowl
8. Ty from Stolen - a worrying one, considering he's a kidnapper
9. Just about every character from These Old Shades, with special mention for Rupert Alastair and Anthony Merivale
10. Honor Harris from The King's General

Anybody agree or disagree? Any lists of your own?