Best of the Best...

[fajrdrako]

30 Day Book Meme: Day 06 – Favorite book of your favorite series OR your favorite book of all time

This is beginning to feel repetitious. The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett. The most interesting, exciting, historical, evocative, atmospheric, funny, capital-R Romantic, entertaining book ever. With the sexiest, smartest, most heartrending hero in literature. The book that starts: "Lymond is back."

Not that I'm unbiased or anything. It's been my favourite book since I was fifteen. I can recite passages. I can recite scenes. (Not very accurately.) I seldom reread it from cover to cover, but I often reread it in bits and pieces.

Some of the best moments (spoilers deleted):

1. The first encounter between Lymond and Sybilla ("From the stews and alleyways of Europe I come, with a taste for killing, and treason, and crime, they say, nameless and enticingly erotic.")
   
2. The scene at Dunbarton, with Christian Stewart. ("He had lost any goodwill left to him.")
   
3. The scene at Dunbarton where he and Will Scott have a good talk ("I remember. You don't like redheads.")
   
4. The scene with Richard in the clearing.
   
5. The tarocco game.
   
6. The meetings with Gideon Somerville.
   
7. The papingo shoot.
   
8. The meeting with Margaret Lennox.
   
9. Lymond's first meeting with Mary Queen of Scots.