The audiobook of #MrTumnal, unabridged and read by Robert Beadle, with music composed by @neilbrownless from an original theme by @vnemma is now available on @audible, @amazon, and @itunes
.
https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B07L5Y6XBG/?source_code=AUKFrDlWS02231890H6-BK-ACX0-136005&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_136005_rh_uk .
#amlistening #books #fantasy #magicrealism #bookstolistento #imaginaryfriends

It’s going to be a scorcher of a weekend and clearly #toohot to do anything but read. Here’s three that you could try and they even appeal to people who don’t usually like magic realism and fantasy – link in the bio. .
What are you reading? .
#books #amreading #SummerReading #summerreads #bookrecommendations #fantasy #magicrealism

It’s looking like another nice weekend to be out and relaxing in the garden or the local park. What are reading? .

Books

.
#amreading #books???? #summerreads #norsemythology #magicrealism #fantasy #ImaginaryFriends

Game of Thrones is a phenonemon that everyone seems to read and/or watched and have been raving about. I actually ended up reading this pretty much concurrently with watching season one of the TV series which might or might not have been a good idea, although I have to say it does seem to be a pretty faithful adaptation.

This is a Big book with a sprawling cast of characters. I was reminded of what Diana Wynne Jones said about maps in her Tough Guide to Fantasyland as I waded through pages and pages of maps at the beginning and wondered how I would keep track of things – short of The Wall in the distant north I’m not sure if I ever really did.

The book is also what I would describe (for want of a better word) as classic ‘sword’n’sorcery’ or high fantasy – the stuff of swords and swordplay, dragons and deception, and battles, whereas ‘my’ kind of fantasy is more your ‘realworld fantasy’ or magical realism. That said I enjoyed the way that the stories (for there are many) are character driven and are told through chapters that are for and about single characters. In this way I felt it was a bit like an Icelandic Saga of old.

My favourite stories were the one’s that involved the young, the in-experienced, or the cast out, who are set to find themselves and learn who it is they must defeat to stay alive. Thus, I found myself most engaged with Bran, Arya, Jon, and Daenerys: all characters to survive until the next book.

This is a book with a very interesting premise that somehow fails to deliver. I absolutely loved the use that Beth makes of 35mm photography and developing her own black and white prints, and how this introduces the idea of S-Ems in our world, but for me she ended up finding out too soon what was going on.

The story then quickly departed our world – Beth joined up with the mysterious organisations far too quickly for my liking – and the story started to inhabit a world that I did not know and didn’t have any way of latching on to what was happening.

The second half of the book was clearly building up to a series, but I doubt whether Beth will return to her photography and that subtle fantasy that I had been so attracted to at the start.

Basing fantasy adventure stories around the Arthurian legends is nothing new, and nor is setting them in wartime. What is different, is mixing them both together, into a Big book with a Big story.

This is a dark tale set at a dark time with a sinister Master and young boy mourning the loss of his brother in the war which has a feel of Neil Gaiman book, but there is an underlying adventure story that is reminiscent of the magic of Diana Wynne Jones with but in its Arthurian links I find Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising Sequence the most influential. We quickly learn what the Winter’s Grasp of the title is and what it can do and we are pitched into a medieval ‘road trip’ to get home in an unfamiliar world.

Just how unfamiliar the world is is just one of the many twists of the book that is cleaning leading up to the series. And whilst I am looking forward to reading the next instalment of the series (something which I hope John Scotcher is already deeply immersed in writing), it is this ‘first book in a series’ nature of the story that I find most troubling. We are always wondering what exactly the Master is wondering and it is never quite explained.

If you have wondered how dangerous dreams can be this is the story that you should be reading.

This is the natural follow-up to Ali Shaw’s brilliant debut, The Girl With Glass Feet. It is every bit as beautifully and lyrically written as that story, but it is in a way a simpler tale. The story is set in remote, back-water America, but the landscape that presents itself to me in my mind is that of a remote, west coast, Scottish Isle, and the people (with perhaps the exception of Elsie) also, in my mind, hark from that area.

Whilst The Girl With Glass Feet left you with the impression that it was a proper modern fairytale, and a story that could be read as either fantasy or allegory, The Man Who Rained can only be read as the fantasy that it is.

It is a beautiful fantasy story though, one with a small cast of well drawn characters, and you really, really want things to work out for Elsie and Finn.

Spider Circus by Alice Nuttall

I knew nothing about Spider Circus before I read this, and little about Alice Nuttall other than she was a student at the university where I work and I had put her profile on the web. When Diana Wynne Jones died she left a hole in the fantasy book world, but I think, just maybe that hole might be being filled.

This is the story of Lizzie, a girl from our own world who meets Jack, discovers that she is a Jumper, and escapes her life to run away with the Spider Circus. In her ordinary, unsatisfactory life, Lizzie has the kind of disfunctional family that reminds you of Polly in Fire & Hemlock. Then, as she jumps through the worlds you think of Homeward Bounders, Howl’s Moving Castle, but with Jack ever-present as some Chrestomanci-type of character but where you don’t know exactly what side Jack is going to come out on – if indeed he is on any side other than his own.

I draw these comparisons with Diana Wynne Jones but that is not say that this book is anything other than original. It’s just brilliant, imaginative, and compulsive reading. Alice Nuttall is a young force to be reconned with in the fantasy world.

Religious fiction is not really my usual bag, but urban fantasy (for want of a better word, and I think there probably is…) is. When I came across this book with its clear Christian allegories, but also its promise of involving Christian, Greek, Roman and Norse gods and mythology I had little idea of how that was going to work. Rightly or wrongly, in my head I had these religious beliefs partitioned off as separate belief systems and so couldn’t get my head around anything that joined them all up into one world.

After a slightly slow start which saw our hero Ben Stanford investigating what he thinks to be just the usual homicide, the pace really gets going and I found myself loving the way that Angella Graff did mix up the apparently separate religions. As an atheist myself I also loved some of the things that Mark (he who wrote The Bible) said about what his ‘actual’ intentions were.

My only criticism of this (if this can be counted as criticism), the first in a series of books, would be that at times the pace of the novel can be a little too breakneck. At times I wanted Angella to just slow down, show us a bit more of the scene, and let us enjoy being with this truly fascinating and disparate cast of characters. Not less dialogue, just a bit more description…

Magical Tales: Myth, Legend, and Enchantment in Children’s Books edited by Diane Purkiss and Carolyne Larrington

This was the accompanying catalogue to the brilliant Magical Books exhibition that has been running this year at Oxford’s Bodleian Library and has been every bit as enjoyable and interesting. It’s a book that celebrates all that I love about my favourite stories, but it also details so many other stories that I am aware of but have not read, but worse, it also reveals a whole host of stories that I have been shamefully been unaware of.

This book should come with a health warning though. I defy you to read a single chapter – or essay – without asking already half a dozen books to your To Read Pile.