Top Five Saturday is a meme hosted by Devouring Books to discover and share books that all have a common theme. Previously, the focus has included witches, werewolves, thrillers, faeries, fairy tale re-tellings, high fantasy and many more. This week’s theme is books with maps in them and there is one obvious and iconic mapped…
Tag: J. R. R. Tolkien
The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon
It is no secret that I love my fantasy. I cut my reading teeth on fantasy – thank you Tolkien and Eddings and so many others! I love the way that the freedom of a fantasy world can throw a light into the contemporary. I love the sheer fun and spectacle that can come with…
30 Day Book Challenge: Day 17!
I find this a very broad category today; A book with a person’s name in the title (real or fictional). I mean in every genre, there are a wealth of books containing (or perhaps consisting of solely) the name of the characters: every one of the Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl series in Young…
30 Day Book Challenge: Day 13!
Day 13, unlucky for some perhaps, brings with it a terribly arbitrary category: A book with a colour in the title. And, yes, I am anglicising the spelling of colour. And in my head, I am thinking “correcting” when I wrote “angliscising”! Okay, well let’s generate a list and celebrate the joys of modern technology:…
30 Day Book Challenge: Day Four!
Day Four and I’m still up to date and this time we are looking at A book you remember from childhood. I cannot recall a time when I did not read – often to escape the attentions of family! – so there are a lot to consider. Again! Enid Blyton was a staple of my…
30 Day Book Challenge: Day One!
Okay, so I came across this at the great Professional Book Nerds site and with an unexpected day off work, I thought I’d start off today. And doing it on my blog rather than Twitter gives me a little more space to ruminate over the prompts which today is Favourite book in a series. Do…
Within the Sanctuary of Wings, Marie Brennan
Sometimes we just need the familiar and the comfortable, don’t we? A warm cuddle of a book. The Natural History of Dragons series by Marie Brennan, of which Within the Sanctuary of Wings is the fifth and, it would appear final, installment, is one of those series. It’s not challenging; it’s a tad formulaic by…
The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro
When I was an impressionable teenager, which feels a long time ago now, I imbibed a lot of Arthurian legends. Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawaine, Bedivere, Ector, Cai, Pelias, The Fisher King, Tristran, Iseult, Mordred, Morgana La Fey. And from there, at University, a unit on Medieval Literature reunited me with Gawain in Sir Gawain and The…
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Fantasy is my (not so) secret (not so) guilty pleasure in reading. Fantasy introduced me to reading through The Hobbit and Tolkien. Fantasy was my escape from teenage tedium … my family was far too middle class to have angst! And I still enjoy a healthy dollop of fantasy, as readers of this blog will…
