Blogging Challenge: Childhood Collections/Books To Get Me Through

For the last two years, I've been taking part in the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. I've had a great deal of fun with it, so naturally I'm continuing it this year. If you'd like to participate, follow that first link for the list of prompts, and then check the main site for the weekly post with links to everyone's responses (and add your own link, if you're so inclined). 

Today's prompt is "something I collected as a child" but honestly, aside from "toys" I literally can't think of anything. Nothing that I just collected for the pure pleasure of owning and looking at. And also, the world's still on fire and it's stressing me out. (I hope and expect that we'll be seeing an inauguration shortly after this goes up, but at this point I would not be surprised to see an attempt at assassination or insurrection instead.) So instead, I'm going off the rails on this one, and I'm going to put together a list of books to help get me through until the world is less of a collection of crises built on top of crises atop a foundation of disasters. 

Every single one of these is a re-read, something I'll be going back to when I just don't have it in me to take in something new.

She-Wolf and Cub, Lilith Saintcrow. This one, I'm reading right now. Highly cyberpunk take on the old Lone Wolf and Cub movies and manga; extremely violent and rather dark, but also a lot of fun. I was talking about it recently and decided that it deserved a re-read, and I don't regret a thing.

Space Opera, Catherynne M. Valente. Eurovision in Space, with the fate of humanity dependent on the performance of the remaining members of Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, a band of broken and struggling people well past their moment of fame. Alternately hilarious, heartbreaking, and uplifting, this book broke me in the best possible way. 

This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I don't even know how to describe this one. It's an epistolary romance; it's a time-traveling adventure; it's a war story. This book also broke me in the best possible ways, and I love it.

The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison. A young prince living on an isolated manor suddenly finds himself ascending to the throne, and sets out to rule with fairness and kindness. The book is basically competence porn, and it's amazing. 

Normally I'd throw Murderbot and Jennifer Crusie titles on here too, but I literally just finished re-reading Murderbot and I've re-read my favorite Crusie books within the last couple of years; I'm not ready to head back to either of those options quite so soon. Oh, and somewhere in there I need to read the second Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse book, Terminal Uprising. (These are also fun and funny, and I highly recommend them -- especially if the second book turns out to be even half as much fun as the first. Space battles, alien mysteries, and unlikely heroes.)

So, if you did the blogging challenge right, what did you collect as a child? And if you feel like it, tell us what books you'd recommend to help us all get through this ugly first bit of 2021.