Elijah David

I've talked before about books I love to reread and elements of my childhood , but today I want to take a different slant. Last week, Mirriam asked her friends and followers for blog topics, and I suggested "Which books do you reread the most and why?" and she responded with this post about the books that shaped her childhood (and her writing). Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy by Tad Williams I didn't actually realize just how much this series influenced my writing until I started rereading the first volume, The Dragonbone Chair , in anticipation of the sequel, The Witchwood Crown , coming out this June. This was the first fantasy with flavors of Tolkien that I encountered that was not simply a carbon copy. It has been called a deconstruction of Tolkien's story, but really it's just a more modern take on high fantasy. It turns a number of tropes on their heads (including prophecy, which is still one of the coolest things about this series). This series ...

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...

Currently Writing:  Merlin Book 2 Currently Reading: Dune by Frank Herbert                                 The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (reread)                                 The Woodcutter by Kate Danley (Kindle) I've been wanting to do another Top 10 post since the first one. I can't do a Top 10 Books general post because there are just too many I love, so I decided that Top 10 rereads was the best way to go. So here, in no particular order, are my Top 10 Books to Reread: The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis I'm counting this whole series as one book, not only because I have an omnibus edition, but because I love to read all of them again and again. All told, I've probably read the whole series five or six times, and individual books anywhere from that number to ten or so. I never come out of rea...