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...

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...

This has been a busier month for me as regards visual art. I haven't painted much, but I've been working on my sketching skills because one goal I've had for ages is to be able to sketch my own characters with some degree of finesse. I'm not going to be designing characters for film any time soon, but I'm pleased with my progress so far. Halcyon and Dammerung: Sassmaster Shapeshifters My watercolor this month is a fan art painting of Halcyon from Mirriam Neal's Paper Crowns  and Dammerung from Jennifer Freitag's Plenilune . These are two of my favorite books from last year, and two of my favorite characters from those books. I'm moderately pleased with the way the tails and bodies turned out, but the paws and faces were a bit wonky. I'm still not sure how to make the backgrounds seem more integrated. Step 4 is more of a guideline. I like to think of it as steps 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, and 4. This hand-lettered piece was actually someth...

This month for Top 10 Tuesday, I thought we'd visit a topic that shows up in a surprising way in Albion Academy : dragons. They can be good; they can be evil; they can be humorous or quite solemn. Whatever they are, they make stories interesting and dangerous. As it has been said ( but NOT by Tolkien ), "Always remember, it’s simply not an adventure worth telling if there aren’t any dragons." Onward to the dragons! (Be sure to keep a wizard and a fire cloak handy.) Maleficent (Disney's  Sleeping Beauty ) She's the self-proclaimed Mistress of All Evil™and a cunning villain bent on the destruction of other people's happiness. Maybe she's a fairy, maybe she's a dragon, maybe she just needed someone to show her true love, but whatever the case, she's one of the most iconic dragons in cinema. Mushu (Disney's  Mulan ) On a lighter note, we have Mushu, the Fa family guardian demoted to gong-ringer for failing to protect one of his c...

I got this from Amanda , who got it from someone, who got it from someone, who got it from the original poster . The idea is to list a book or character who fits the associations listed with each month's birthstone. This should be fun. 1. January (Garnet): Associated with warding off negative forces and dark energies. Name a book with the darkest/evilest character you can think of. Seven Princes by John R. Fultz: The main villain of this book made me sick to my stomach. If I'd had the physical book for this, I'd have thrown it across the room. 2. February (Amethyst): Purple is associated with royalty. Name a book with regal qualities. You can base this off of characters or choose the King of all books. The Lord of the Rings : It's regal. It has kings. It is the king of fantasy. 3. March (Aquamarine): Washed out. Name a 'wishy washy' character, a character who is not strong or a follower. Georgiana from A School for Unusual Girls : She has very little dri...

When I first started reading Plenilune , I didn't really have any idea what it was about. I knew that I wanted to read it after finishing Mirriam's novel Monster (although I foolishly went on a trip without already having purchased Plenilune , so I had to delay it until I finished the book I started as soon as Monster was over, The Paper Magician ). I knew that I enjoyed reading Jenny's blog posts and that she was good friends with Mirriam. Other than that (and the tantalizing precis on Amazon's item page ), I was going in blind. The Prose But from the opening chapters, I was sucked in. The prose in this book is rich and wonderful. Biblical and Shakespearean references do more than pepper the story -- they flavor it through and through. The characters leap to life like those in Dickens and Austen. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if you took Austen's books, melded them a bit with Burrough's planetary fantasy, and added a dash of C. S. Lewis, you...