Much like last year, my first 5 star book of the year came to me courtesy of my brother, who’s turning out to be quite the amazing book giver. The Bear and the Nightingale ticked so many boxes for me – well realised characters and setting, great world-building, oodles of imagination and conjuring the sorts of feelings you get from the better, darker fairytales – I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to be reading it all of the time (and did pretty much […]
“A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”
I somehow managed to make it 30 years without reading A Wrinkle in Time. I was certain I had read it before, how could I not have, but the story didn’t seem familiar while I was reading. However, it did make me nostalgic to reread Phantom Tollbooth now. A brief summary (since everyone will be writing about this book in the upcoming two weeks): Meg Murry, her baby brother Charles Wallace, and their neighbor Calvin are sent on a journey through time and space by […]
Easy and Breezy
A magical little journey that was delightful but also didn’t quite have the teeth for me to really sink in with it. I am of course familiar with Hayao Miyazaki’s movie version of Howl’s Moving Castle, but heard that the novel was quite different. And it is in some ways, but also follows a similar plot in others. It really is fun and delightful, and not too serious which was great for me to read through at work while in the midst of some personal issues. […]
Only two more (and a side-novel) until Sanderson!
How many more ways can I find to say the same things about this series? A series whose problems I identified as early as book three, and which has continued to embrace those problems rather than fix them. Presumably because Jordan didn’t see them as problems but rather as features. Which is one of the problems. It’s a whole problematical circle of problems, and ouroboroses eating their tails and such (a fitting image since the Wheel of Time is basically an ouroboros sailing some sort […]