Top Ten Tuesday: Book Hangovers

Oh goodness, this was so good: such a compelling main character in Jam, an utterly convincing world, a wonderfully monstrous hunter in Pet – dragging itself from a picture into three dimensional corporeality through blood, moonlight and the scent of the hunt!

And, oh, the revelation of who the monster being hunted was!

I could have chosen this or the previous The Night Circus – God! I want to, need to read that again! Because Morgenstern is so wonderful at atmosphere and location: the circus and nor the underground library and repository of all the world’s stories.

Absolutely wonderful!

The beauty of her language and imagery where stories live on in food and drink, in clothes and shrouds is so compellingly gorgeous!

With Blood Wedding, it was the characters rather than the setting and world building that caused the book hangover: the flight of the apparent sociopath Sophie was gripping enough, but the revelation that all was not as it seemed and the stomach-wrenching twist – the terrifying incredible relentless pursuit of Sophie – was heart-racing, heart-stopping…

And the final chapters where we never knew who was playing whom… oh!

Anything by Hardinge causes a book hangover for me: her mastery of the vivid compelling in depth world is exceptional. And Deeplight took us from the historical fantasy of Cuckoo Song, The Lie Tree and A Skinful of Shadows into a fully realised Lovecraftian fantasy world of monstrous gods beneath seas, now reduced to mere relics, and a sea punk aesthetic….

How hard to come back to the real world once you’ve visited this one?

Being a village lad myself, with a penchant for the fairytale in his reading, Lanny was a perfect storm of all I love!

Dead Papa Toothwort, the personification of or genius loci of the village – or perhaps the Puckish hobgoblin of the village – bore echoes of every green man figure you might have ever come across: Herne the Hunter, Puck, Robin Goodfellow… and any number of created characters in the stories I make up for my daughter.

And, golly, Porter is so good at voices: the voices of the village, disembodied, mundane and lyrical, are done so wonderfully!

This is one of my favourite fantasy series – as much as anything because it eschews the tired familiarity of Medieval Western European setting for a Russian mythology.

Set in a distant village, the daughter of the local boyar is caught between her nurse’s traditional fairytale and legends of ancient myths on one hand, and her Christian stepmother on the other. A world that is not quite Christianised in its heart, but does not quite remember or respect the ancient pagan ways.

Which turns out to be pretty important as two of those pagan mythological gods, the brothers Medved and Morozko, bring their conflict to Vasya’s doorstep.

An utterly compelling world and characters is introduced to us in The Bear and the Nightingale and is resolved wonderfully in The Winter of the Witch.

Kate Atkinson appears on many of these lists, but she is such a great writer!

Life After Life creates an idyllic – and terribly English – home for the Todd family, weaving a wonderful tapestry of characters into its pages as we approach the horrors of World War Two.

And then twists it with a fantasy idea: the Ursula Todd we first meet dies in childbirth on her first incarnation, but survives her own birth in later iterations only to die repeatedly and be reborn on the same snow stormy night. Despite the numerous trials she puts Ursula through – and there are many! – the writing is humane, tender and gorgeous.

The Trojan War and The Iliad – the most masculine bastion of all masculine books and dripping with testosterone – is retold from Briseis’ point of view, giving a voice to the women that Homer silenced through it.

The language is beautiful and the depiction of the Greek war camps is simultaneously lyrical and brutal. But the characters leap out bright with new life: I have known Patroclus and Achilles since I was sixteen, but after reading this novel I felt I knew them.

Connell and Marianne’s one-and-off relationship – co-dependent and deeply troubled – is the core of the novel.

Whilst I found their relationship deeply uncomfortable to read in many places, there is no denying the power of Rooney’s writing and the vividness of her characters. From school into young adulthood, Connell and Marianne meet, date, split up, become friends, date other people, and get back together again repeatedy.

Rooney is so good, though, at writing relationships and however unhealthy their relationship was, it was utterly compellingly written.

Okay. I am cheating here: this is not one of my most recent book hangovers. But is was one of my biggest book hangovers ever!

And 2020 is a bitter sweet year! Sweet, because we only have a few weeks left before the next chance to visit Tudor England in company with Thomas Cromwell; bitter, because The Mirror and The Light will conclude the trilogy.

A little like The Silence of the Girls, Wolf Hall lets you really know the characters you have read about so many times.