Elijah David

Yes, I know this is a ThrowBook Thursday post, and therefore it's supposed to be about a book that's stayed with me over the years. But I honestly wasn't sure which one book to talk about this month, and I thought I could revisit my top 10 books. Only I haven't actually done a top 10 books post. I've done posts on my top 10 books to reread , top 10 fantasy books , top 10 non-fantasy/sci-fi books , and even top 100-ish books . So today I'm going to do a Top 10 Books post, with an emphasis on why these books have stayed with me. These are the books that I would choose if I had to choose only ten books to be able to read for the rest of my life. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell One of my perennial favorites, this novel is the perfect mixture of fantasy and so-called "literary" fiction. It blends the humor and social commentary of authors like Austen and Dickens with the magic of Tolkien. It has spiritual, moral, and emotional depth. It features cr...

Before we dive into this month's Top 10, I want to share a couple pieces of fan art created one of my betas for the Albion books. I'm very excited to share them with you because who doesn't love seeing characters they've written inspire others to create something? Robin from Albion Academy ( Source ) Merlin and Robin in Albion Apparent ( Source ) You can check out more of Meltintalle's art on her Tumblr . Okay, back to the subject at hand. I know that "scary" is a subjective word, so let me clarify: these are characters that have, at one time or another, frightened me. Most of them were just frightening when I was a child (in some cases, specific incidents when I was a child), but all of them still have something unsettling about them even now. The Headless Horseman Source I'm thinking in particular of the version from Disney's animated adaptation of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (which was first released as...

September brings autumn with it, and though that may not be official for another three weeks, I want to jump-start the season with a run down of some favorite books to read in the fall. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien Aside from the fact that this book begins in the fall, it just has such an autumnal feel to me throughout. It has forests and traveling and longing for both home and adventure, which encapsulates the spirit of the season for me. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury I'll try not to overload this list with Halloween-ish stories, but Something Wicked is such an autumn-infused story. Will's father even calls the carnival's denizens "The Autumn People". Bradbury and this book may be partly responsible for my own love of autumn. The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis Really, Narnia in general can feel autumnal, but The Horse and His Boy  is the most autumnal, with its arid atmosphere and the Hermit of the South...

John Barth, author of Lost in the Funhouse , once said that writers tend to fall into one of two categories: sprinters and marathon runners, meaning they tend to excel at short stories or novels. Ever since I first read this description, I have identified strongly with it because, like Barth, I rarely find myself wanting to sprint (write a short story). Most stories that I'm inspired to write come to me as fully fledged novels. However, just because I don't tend to write short stories doesn't mean I don't enjoy reading them. I recently was reminded of a short story collection I read four years back and was inspired to track down a copy to read again. In that spirit, I'm listing out my Top 10 Short Story Collections. They are, in roughly ascending order: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie This loosely connected collection of stories deals with the Native American/Amerindian/First Nations experience in modern America. It's a skil...

I was listening to the soundtrack for Finding Neverland (the musical) today, and when I reached the song "Circus of Your Mind" a thrilling idea occurred to me -- this is the sound I would want in a musical version of Something Wicked This Way Comes  by Ray Bradbury. It's possible that the idea was slightly influenced by my listening to the soundtrack for the Addams Family  musical recently as well. In any event, I started wondering about what else I would like to see in a Something Wicked  musical. The Story For those of you unfamiliar with Something Wicked This Way Comes , it is the story of two friends, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, who were born within minutes of each other on the night before Halloween. Their friendship is tested when a traveling carnival run by the mysterious duo Cooger and Dark comes to town. The carnival (true to its trope) brings the citizens of the town face to face with their deepest desires and fears, usually with messy results (su...

I'm currently reading two short story collections --  Skin by Roald Dahl and Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro -- and the stark contrast between the two has got me thinking about my love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with so-called "literary" fiction. It's not that I don't want to like literary fiction. It's that so much of it just feels humdrum, hopeless, and depressing. I tell myself I'll give the genre another try. I spend the months afterward in a speculative fiction miasma trying to get the taste out of my mouth. Anyway, the two collections differ in one major way: Dahl's stories, though grim and sometimes unsettling, have a levity to their prose, a hint of magic in the world even when dealing with perfectly ordinary people and situations. The opening stories all deal in some way with crime and passion, but they never feel like over-the-top sensationalism. Dahl has a way of making even the ordinary seem extraordinary without telling us he...

Current Reads: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke                         The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier                         Mountain of Black Glass by Tad Williams Current Writing Projects: Thesis material, currently a story titled "A Young Man with Grassy Arms" Ray Bradbury passed away this week. This is probably the second or third time I can remember an author whose works I love to read passing away (the last was Brian Jacques, and if I remember correctly Madeleine L'Engle was in there somewhere as well). What makes this even more sad, scary or possibly frightening is the fact that in my large stack of thesis reading material this summer there sit four books of his short stories for me to read, study and subsume. I don't believe in coincidences, especially where authors are concerned. I sat on my couch for a good fifteen minutes trying to ...