Elijah David

As the year draws to an end, I thought I would use this month's ThrowBook Thursday to look back on the books that I've enjoyed the most this year. If I've written about the book, I'll link to the post in its description. If not, I'll rave about it a bit. (For the sake of fairness, I'm not considering books that I read for a second or more time this year, else this would be a list of old favorites.) The Chestnut King by N.D. Wilson The finale of the 100 Cupboards series. I'll be writing a full review soon, but suffice it to say that this book was immensely satisfying. Turn Coat by Jim Butcher I haven't written about my love for this series much, which I hope to rectify in the coming months. I have mentioned it here , here , and here . Turn Coat is the eleventh book in the series, which currently stands at 15 novels, one short story collection, and several graphic novels. A further collection and novel are due out in the next year or two, ...

For those of you who don't know (or need a refresher), Brandon Sanderson's First Law of Magic is: An author's ability to solve conflict satisfactorily with magic is  directly proportional  to how well the reader understands said magic.  I'll admit that when I started writing this blog post, I had forgotten the rest of the essay in which Sanderson lays out his argument for this principle (linked above). He actually makes allowances for authors writing different styles of magic than he prefers. But his scale runs from "soft" magic (i.e. little or no explanation in the story) to hard magic (i.e. the rules are given and followed within the story). I'd come to this topic inspired by a conversation in the Books thread over at NarniaWeb about logical vs. intuitive stories. I've recently read a couple of books that seemed to work in stark contrast to Sanderson's First Law, and I thought perhaps the logical vs. intuitive distinction might be relevant...