Tag: fantasy

The Name of the Wind (2007): Patrick Rothfuss

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★★★★

I don’t read as much fantasy as I did when I was a teenager, but I still enjoy being able to lose myself in other worlds now and again. Often I just return to the favourite books that are already on my shelves, but once in a while I take the plunge and try something new. It’s never without a hint of nervousness: it strikes me that in fantasy there’s so much more scope for things to go wrong. The task of building a plausible, solid and convincing world is that much more challenging than it would be in any other genre. So, with fantasy, I tend to hang back until the weight of acclaim turns a particular book into a must-read. Over the past year, I’ve probably seen The Name of the Wind in Waterstones at least a dozen times, and each time I picked it up, flicked through it, and put it back unconvinced. Over the Christmas holidays I finally caved in, and I’m so glad I did.

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

★★★½

(directed by Peter Jackson, 2012)

On a chilly evening last Sunday in Leicester Square, waiting for the doors of the Odeon to open, I found it hard to believe that eleven years have passed since The Fellowship of the Ring came out. A fair amount has happened in those years, but in this moment they ceased to exist: the prospect of spending an evening in Peter Jackson’s version of Middle Earth made me feel as if I were sixteen years old all over again.

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The Diviner (2011): Melanie Rawn

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★★★

As you may remember from my recent post, The Golden Key was one of my favourite books of my teenage years and I could hardly believe my luck when I stumbled upon Melanie Rawn’s recently-published prequel, The Diviner, in a local charity shop last weekend. You might recall that The Golden Key was a remarkably successful collaborative work between Rawn and two other writers, Jennifer Roberson and Kate Elliot. I read somewhere that the authors had planned to write a prequel trilogy, taking one book each (that was probably on Wikipedia: let’s be honest about the standard of my sources).

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Baudolino (2000): Umberto Eco

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★★★½

This was a reread, but it might as well have been a first encounter: I’d read Baudolino back in spring 2004 and remembered virtually nothing of the plot, beyond my delight that Niketas Choniates was one of the main characters. Yes, I probably do need to explain that. By sheer chance, I’d begun to read this novel after a term spent studying medieval European history, during which one of my essays had required me to spend a week getting my head around the mechanics of the Byzantine court. I didn’t really manage it, but it sparked off my fascination with Byzantium and, even better, it introduced me to Niketas. His Annals include what has become one of my favourite historian quotes: ‘There can be no one so mad as to believe there is anything more pleasurable than history.’ Bravo that man.

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The Golden Key (1996): Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson and Kate Elliott

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★★★★½

This was one of the first properly ‘grown-up’ books I bought for myself, at the age of thirteen and it had a huge impact on me; yet I didn’t read it again until 2007 and I’ve just finished it for the third time. Overall, I still think it’s one of the most unusual and imaginative speculative fiction books I’ve read, and I’m immensely fond of its protagonist: a compelling antihero. Bookshops shelve it under sci-fi and fantasy, but there are also strong strains of historical fiction, Gothic horror and family saga. And it’s a fine example of fictional world-building. Over the course of the story you grow to understand the political dynamics of a state, and also its relationship with the wider world; its customs and traditions; its language; and, more than any of these things, its art.

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The Song of Achilles (2011): Madeline Miller

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★★★½

I went over to the dark side recently and treated myself to a Kindle. In my defence, it was mainly a matter of expedience. Being a fast reader, I suffer the consequences of long train journeys or business trips.  Things reached a peak when, during a visit to Germany, my copy of World Without End weighed more than the rest of my hand luggage put together.  Rather than heave enormous books around Europe, just in case I run out of something to read, it seems much more sensible to have multiple e-books at my fingertips. And so, for my first Kindle experience, I lighted on Madeleine Miller’s Song of Achilles, which promised to indulge my fascination with the myth cycle of the Trojan War.

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