Strictly for favorites, irrespective of rating. May be biased, you have been warned.
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. This week, we are looking at books guaranteed to make you smile, aka feel-good books.
Honestly, I think this is my favorite sort of books, irrespective of the genre. I could go on piling books here but will try to restrict it to just ten — for your sake!
It’s time for The Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge, hosted by Long and Short Reviews. The topic for August 4, 2021 is Meet My Pets.
It’s a lifelong desire for me to bring home a pet dog. Perhaps some day I shall! So, I have no images to share for now, but I do have some fabulous links about pets that steal the show.
First, look up the YouTube channel by MochaMilk. This YouTuber has two wonderful dogs, though I’m partial towards the Samoyed named Wooyoo (meaning milk in Korean). I just adore this dog, and the videos are always shot so well.
Another YouTube channel is Life with Malamutes. They are giant fuzzballs, so close to their wolfish ancestors. I love Phil the most, and here’s a video of them doing some food-tasting.
I’d recommend the movie Hachiko, on the off chance that you’ve not seen it. It’s a moving tale about a dog that waited for his best friend, years after even his family had moved on. The dog here is the Japanese Akita, and he’s beautiful.
For fictional animal sidekicks, I have a full post here. There’s no scarcity of those in my life, thankfully.
Who are your pets? Let’s go meet them!
//Who drew the patterns of the stars, if not a god? Who designed the marvellous cycle of cloud and rain and river, if not a god? Who made you— and you— and you too— if not some god whose name we have forgotten?//
The Alleluia Files by Sharon Shinn is the third book in her Samaria series. It can be read as a standalone, as long as you have some background information of the past centuries on Samaria (which I am happy to provide below).
We find ourselves on a different planet, where the Samarians, Edori and Jacobites co-exist. Samarians worship the God known as Jovah. When they ‘sing’ to Jovah, Jovah instantly (and I do mean instantly) sends help within the hour, in the form of rain, medicines and grain.
The Edori are nomads and sailors who believe that somewhere out there is a supreme universal being, but they’re not sure whether that being is Jovah or not. And then there are the Jacobites, bitter agnostics, who claim that Jovah is not a God — instead, Jovah is a machine!
Oh, what an absolute gem of a book. Quiet and unassuming on the surface, yet so utterly charming and thought-provoking.
Bon Agornin dies one day, leaving behind two sons and three daughters. His sons, Penn and Avan, are in the clergy and government respectively, and his eldest daughter, Berend, is the matron in a wealthy family. The youngest daughters, Haner and Selendra, are unmarried, and are forced apart when their patriarch dies. Much of the story is about Haner and Selendra being uprooted from their old home and settling down in their new environment: Haner with Berend and her husband, and Selendra with her parson brother Penn.
They are all dragons. And dragons have a singular custom — that of eating dragon flesh of the deceased, because that is the only way they can increase in power and sustenance. Walton gives them other dragon-like characteristics and rituals too, but at the heart of the story is the grim truth that dragon eats dragon to flourish. It is to Walton’s credit that she makes dragon customs like these feel real but empathetic.
It’s time to wrap-up the wonderful Wyrd and Wonder challenge. The rule for this last prompt is to describe your five-star reads in five (or near five) words each. Well, I do keep a running list of all my favorite SFF reads HERE, but trying to describe them each in a phrase or less was a completely new exercise!
The Bulfinch Encyclopedia of Mythology states that the twelve most illustrious knights of Emperor Charlemagne of the Holy Roman Empire were called Paladins. Lois McMaster Bujold took this term and applied it to the hero of her 2003 book, The Paladin of Souls, for which she got her fourth Hugo Award.
Paladin of Souls is a fantasy work set in Chalion, a land where religious practice is split among the Five Gods: Father of Winter, Mother of Summer, Son of Autumn, Daughter of Spring, and the Bastard (God of Death). The Five Gods put a curse on Chalion a long time back, and people still suffer from the after-effects. The mythological world-building in this book is absolutely gripping.
Piranesi is fantasy fiction but at its heart, it is a mystery. And what a mind-boggling, thought-provoking mystery it is.
A house with at least 7000 halls, giant statues, sea tides and migratory birds has only 2 inhabitants: Piranesi and The Other. Where have all the other humans gone? Does the House leave secret messages for Piranesi, even as he struggles to record all that he sees there? And why is The Other searching for secrets of immortality and other occultist knowledge?
“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.
Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”
Ironically, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke is the exact reverse of this contemplation. It is the downhill path that a magician’s ambition must inevitably take him. If you are looking for a finger-biting adventure into the hearts of men, look no further.
The book is based on an alternative history of England, when magicians once used to rule the land. The most illustrious of these was John Uskglass, or the Raven King. For some unknown reason, Raven King wrapped up his Faerie courts one day and vanished. With him, magic disappeared from England for centuries.
Books 1 & 2: Goblin Moon / Hobgoblin Night by Teresa Edgerton
Genres / Tropes: 18th Century Alternative History, Fantasy, Alchemy, Search for Atlantis and Philosopher’s Stone, Zorro-like Vigilantes
Published: 1991 / 2015
Similar Books: Sorcery & Cecilia by Caroline Stevermer and Patricia Wrede, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Books by Georgette Heyer, Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater, The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells, The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
Rating: 10 of 10. Highly Recommended.
Two alchemists try to raise a dead magician who may know how to make the Seramarias Stone. Two women try to flee a vengeful fairie halfling and her troll minions. A secret glassmakers guild plans to raise a submerged Atlantis-like island. A half-mad, sleepdust-addicted Zorro-like vigilante risks all to expose black magic cartels and the slavers’ trade. And no one can make sense of the homunculus and the golem out in the world. Clearly, a lot happens!
Book: Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (Series: Vorkosigan Saga)
Published: November 2012 (Baen Books)
Audiobook Narrator: Grover Gardner (Blackstone Audio)
Genre/ Trope: Space Opera, Humor, Meet the Family
Rating: 9 of 10 / Highly Recommended
A perfect feel-good read for a lazy summer afternoon! I was chortling my way through this book about Captain Ivan Vorpatril, a rather laidback bureaucrat in the intergalactic Barrayaran Empire. The good news is that the book can be read as a standalone, and is a very good gateway into science fiction.
Ivan Vorpatril is the scion of a powerful political family in Barrayar, but he isn’t very ambitious. He would just rather stick on at his comfortable government job and enjoy his bachelor’s life. His meddlesome cousin Byerly asks him for a favor to check-in on two immigrant women living under fake identities — and poor Ivan can say goodbye to his uneventful life!
