le plus loin le plus serré

le plus loin le plus serré
mourning art

in memoriam

"yet I tell you, from the sad knowledge of my older experience, that to every one of you a day will most likely come when sunshine, hope, presents and pleasure will be worth nothing to you in comparison with the unattainable gift of your mother's kiss." (Christina Rossetti, "Speaking Likenesses," 1873)

Saturday, June 02, 2012

A Diana Wynne Jones Alphabet

In response to alphabooks, I started thinking about characters with names beginning with some of the more obscure letters of the alphabet, which led me (naturally, since most things do) to Diana Wynne Jones. I got to thinking some more, and I've decided to try to make an alphabet of characters (place names in a pinch *if I have to*) from her books.s i

There are, of course, plenty of names I could have chosen for a lot of the letters; I tried to have some representative distribution across books. "X" is my major failure - I can't think of an X name. And my other rule for myself was: NO PEEKING. No looking in books - this is all from memory. So if there's an X, even an obscure one, it isn't lodged in my memory accessibly enough.
it was fun to compile. I may play with similar lists in the future, simply as a kind of game to relax my brain after pummeling it to do dissertation work.

Ammet
Blade
Chrestomanci (of course!)
Dillian
Erskine
Fifi
Gwendolen
Howl (obviously!)
Isodel
Jamie
Kialan
Lydda
Maewen
Nan
Olga
Polly
Querida
Rupert
Sirius
Tanaqui
Umru
Vivian Smith/ Venturus/Vierran (so many V-names, which is unusual; I had to include a few)
Wend
Xanadu structures in The Merlin Conspiracy (I can NOT think of any X names - suggestions?)
Yam
Zenobia Bailey

3 comments:

Sally_Odgers said...

This is exactly the sort of eccentric thing I do. I listed almost all the names in my own books on a whim - and they're up there on the net - somewhere. The DWJ wiki has a lot of character names listed, though not by me.

Sally_Odgers said...

Just checked the wiki at http://suberic.net/cgi-bin/dwj/wiki.cgi?Characters and discovereth no X names.

Unknown said...

This one is an incredible art! Love the theme of this painting.
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