This week’s Top 10 Tuesday has us looking at top 10 books that we recommend often to fellow bloggers and friends. Since May is also the month for Wyrd & Wonder, I’m going to stick to some underrated books from fantasy fiction that I do like to clobber people with.
The wonderful Wyrd & Wonder has started off again, hosted by Annemieke (A Dance With Books), Ariane (The Book Nook), Jorie (Jorie Loves A Story), Lisa (Dear Geek Place) and Imyril (There’s Always Room For One More). Thanks so much to them for all the effort that goes into this!
This Sunday, the prompt is top 5 magical systems (or spells) that we have come across in books. Obviously, world-building plays a huge role, but my picks are based on certain really striking book scenes.
This week we have a genre freebie for Top 10 Tuesday, and I am going with Top 10 Mythological Fantasy Books. I really do like a plot where the gods get interested in mortal affairs, leading to much chaos — and great world-building.
1 / The Chalion Series / World of the Five Gods series by Lois McMaster Bujold
2 / Inheritance Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin
3 / Paternus Trilogy by Dyrk Ashton
4 / Malazan Book of the Fallen Series by Steven Erikson
5 / Edda of Burdens trilogy by Elizabeth Bear
6 / The Queen’s Thief Series by Megan Whalen Turner
7 / Tales of the Magatama Series by Noriko Ogiwara
8 / Indulgence Series by Erin Kellison
9 / The Wicked + The Divine saga by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie
10 / The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Have you read or are you interested any of these mythological fantasy books? Please feel free to leave as many recs as possible too!
Book: The Throme of the Erril of Sherill by Patricia A. McKillip
Published: 1973
Tropes: Short Story/ Novella, Knight quests, Riddles, Puns, Folktales
Readalikes: Alice in Wonderland, The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Edward Lear
The mad King Magnus sends his knight Caerles on a quest, to look for the Throme of the Erril of Sherill. (A tongue twister, if ever there was one — and it’s not a throne, by the way). If Caerles succeeds, he gets to marry the king’s daughter, who has been locked up in the castle and has never ever laughed. The problem is: the Throme doesn’t exist. Or does it?
“You are cruel and loveless, you and your wanting.”
“I know,” Magnus Thrall whispered. “I know. The Throme is my hope. Find it for me, Caerles.”
It seems like a wild goose chase from the beginning. And poor Caerles seems to be the only sane person in the book. I was chuckling at all his dry witticisms throughout.
“… I do not know what use it is to hurry when I do not know where I am going, and when there will be nothing to find when I get there.”
The whole novella is actually poetry in the form of prose. Does that make sense? Seriously, I’m in awe of McKillip. To pack such a riddle in such lovely words, and to then blend it with humor and pun and brilliant character sketches? This was beautiful. Mesmerizing.
“The house of the King was a tall thing of great, thick stones and high towers and tiny slits of windows that gleamed at night when the King paced his hearth stones longing for the Throme. He had a daughter who sat with him and wept and embroidered pictures of the green world beyond the walls, and listened to her father think aloud to the pale sunlight or the wisps of candle-flame.”
Winter of Ice and Iron by Rachel Neumeier
Standalone Epic Fantasy
Published: 2017
Tropes: Land Magic/ Wild Magic, Mythological Fantasy, Bi-Protagonist, Court Intrigue, Dark Fantasy.
Winter of Ice and Iron was my pick for the “winter” theme for January, in Bookish Valhalla’s TBR SFF 2022 challenge. I’ve read and liked Neumeier’s work before and I think she deserves more press — so I picked this one up with interest.
Each kingdom’s land has a wild force which must be mastered by its ruler (else it will destroy the ruler and the people). Trouble starts when one particular mad king plans to usurp the wildforces of all neighboring kingdoms.
“Wolf Month was the starving month, the bitter month, the month when winter stores grew lean and the new growth had not yet come, the month when the long haunting cries of the wolves drifted almost nightly from the high mountains. It was a hard month. The cold lingered.”
This book reminded me of Game of Thrones but with land magic involved. (There are a lot of kings and queens asking each other to “bend the knee” which is a GOT reference if ever I saw one.) Ahem:
The Witness for the Dead
Series: The Goblin Emperor Series (but can be read as standalone)
Published: June 2021
Book Themes / Tropes: I can speak to the Dead, Judicial power politics, Court intrigue, A Good Person
Recommended if you like: Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, Chalion series by Lois McMaster Bujold, or generally any mythological fantasy work
Rating: 9 of 10
How many times do we come across truly good, kind people in fiction? People who do the right thing even if that doesn’t help them much politically, simply because it is the right thing to do? In Witness for the Dead, Addison has created a good person in the form of Celehar who works as a witness for the dead.
