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Art & Illustration Best of List Books Memes Watchlist

Desert Island Reads #WyrdAndWonder

(PEGASUS IMAGE CREDIT: Svetlana Alyuk on 123RF.com)

For the Wyrd & Wonder challenge, throughout May 2021 we have a series of challenge prompts. I’ve managed to tackle most of these by now, and our favorite Desert Island Reads are next on the list. You choose 8 (audio)books, 1 piece of media, and 1 artifact.

As our hosts put it: “Imagine yourself cast away with nothing to do but read. Okay, so this doesn’t sound entirely awful – but choosing our limited island library is the real challenge. We’re not going to worry about solving the challenge of survival, just how to while away the days (weeks? months?) until we’re rescued.”

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Books Starred Recommendations

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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?

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Best of List Memes Recommendations

Seaborne Fantasy Books: Get in the Sea #WyrdAndWonder

Thanks to the wonderful Wyrd and Wonder challenge for reminding that May 22 is Maritime Day. So, let’s make it watery with all kinds of seaborne fantasy books: mermaid tales, sirens, ladies in the lake, pirates and other nautical adventurers. Get in the sea!

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Books Recommendations

The Darkangel Trilogy by Meredith Ann Pierce

The Darkangel Trilogy by Meredith Ann Pierce
Books: The Darkangel, A Gathering of Gargoyles, The Pearl of the Soul of the World
Published: 1998-1999
Recommended if you like: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin / The Chronicles of Narnia / The Ancient Mariner / Gothic mysteries in general
Rating: 8.5 / 10 – Recommended!

The Ancient Ones created the world, and disappeared. The wicked White Witch took advantage of their disappearance, and enslaved and bewitched the Wardens of the kingdoms. Her evil magic has caused the planet to become a barren, perilous desert.

The Witch’s vampyric sons, the Icari, also trap the souls of human women in order to become immortal. One of them, Irralyth, kidnaps a human bride and the bride’s slave girl, Aeriel.

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Books Memes

Top 10 Book Titles that are Complete Sentences

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. This week’s topic was Book Titles That Are Complete Sentences. I thought this would be difficult, but it actually turned out to be so much fun!

  1. Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
  2. We Have Always Fought by Kameron Hurley
  3. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
  4. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
  5. Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come by Jessica Pan
  6. Here Be Dragons by David P. Macpherson
  7. I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing by Maya Angelou
  8. Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
  9. Steal the Sky by Megan E. O’Keefe 
  10. Love Is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson
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Best of List Memes Watchlist

Page to Screen Adaptations Some Day #Wyrd&Wonder

Screen Adaptations - Asterix GIF

The Wyrd and Wonder challenge is running through this month. Today we are talking about any Page to Screen adaptation / dramatization that we would really like to see get made. I thought I’d have a go at this for the SFF genre, and I think many of these may already be in the works.

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Books Long Posts Memes

#WyrdAndWonder Book Tag for May 2021

#WyrdAndWonder Book Tag
(PEGASUS IMAGE CREDIT: Svetlana Alyuk on 123RF.com)

For the Wyrd & Wonder challenge, throughout May 2021 we have a series of challenge prompts. I thought of linking them all up with a single mammoth #WyrdAndWonder Book Tag (because book tags are cool and I’m still new to them). So, here it is:

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Memes

Top 10 Books with Environment Motifs

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. This week’s topic was books with Nature on the cover. On those lines, I tried to think of books that may also deal with environment themes / motifs, or even wild magic and herblore!

Which books did this environmental TTT theme make you think of? Let’s discuss!

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Best of List Books Index

Foreign & Translated SFF Works: A Rec List

I read a lot of SFF. But thanks to prompt(s) at the Wyrd & Wonder reading challenge, I realized that very few of my SFF reads were published outside of US or UK (and sometimes, Australia, New Zealand). So this week, let’s focus on the more translated SFF works: SFF works that weren’t originally written in English.

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Books Memes Watchlist

Top 10 Recent Reads/ April Wrap-Up

This week I have decided to combine the April wrap-up and the Top 10 Tuesday topic of books I recently read. It was a busy month, unlike March, with many hits and misses.