Happy Birthday to Us!

[wendelah1]

Since today is the fourth anniversary of the creation of xf_book_club by our illustrious founder, emily_shore, I thought a brief post in its honor was in order. Yes, we will be returning you to our regularly scheduled programming shortly.



How about if we post our top five lists? Any top five lists you like...top five first times, top five smut muffins, top five angst fics, top five casefiles. Anything and everything goes.

Here is my list of top five stories to take to a desert island, the stories I can't live without. This is not necessarily a list of the best stories in this fandom, although I must say I think they are all very fine fics; instead, these are five stories I read and reread, because for various reasons they hit my pleasure center dead on.

1. "Fugue" by rivkat. The ending haunts me. It also has hot sex, features amnesia as a plot device, and has a doomed ship.

2. "The Sin Eater" by Jane Mortimer. This one has gorgeous writing, time travel and another doomed ship.

3. "The Beginner's Guide to Tight-Rope Walking" by Kel. This has my favorite original character, a fix-it for a dropped 1013 plotline, humor, angst, dramatic tension, and did I mention it's a love story? Kel really can do it all.

4. "Arizona Highways" by fialka. The link is to her website; as with Gossamer, I can't link you to the story itself. You have to click on the "the-xfiles" bon-bon, then on "Arizona Highways." My candidate for best novel in the fandom.

5. "Instructions" by tree. Lately, she’d begun a ritual. In every new town she pocketed some small item: a pebble, a leaf. Each one was a memory. Each of these vignettes is a memory, too.

If you don't want to post fic lists, you can just post messages of celebration! Thank you to all of our members for four years of great discussions and recs and love for The X-Files fanfiction. Thank you to amyhit for her insightful comments and her co-moderating/co-maintainering awesomeness. Thank you to everyone who has helped out with posting when I couldn't.

I love this place. We are truly one of a kind in fandom.

Banner re-blogged from my favorite tumblr, shit.between.us. Probably. I get all of those tumblrs confused, don't you?