Hello everyone! I hope you’re all having a good day. I would like to ask all of you, what is the most magical novel you have ever read? What is a novel that had you glued from its opening word and until its closing sentence? What is the novel that made you realize that literature is art? What was the book that made you fall in love with reading? What book will you keep on your shelf until it disintegrates? Please tell me as vividly as you are able, everything about your novel of choice, what resonated with you, what was it about this particular novel that captivated you? Please do not shy away from detail if possible, I hope to hear about all of your novels and what drew you in particular to them.
Thank you all so much for taking the time to reply, I hope you have a lovely day.
by Unkillable_Butter
9 Comments
{{Cloud Cuckoo Land}} is amazing
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. So *real*. The author is a genius, imo.
Edit: {{Cloudstreet}}
Gotta be Erin Morgenstern for me: The Night Circus and The Starless Sea.
These are the two books I feel a consistent, active urge to reread. Both have literal magical elements, but the writing itself is also magical and evocative, with flowery descriptions that made me feel like I’m a dream. In both books, certain chapters take place in different timelines and I loved piecing everything together as I went, and then again on rereads.
The Dragon riders of Pern Ann McCaffrey. Read it in a Tree when I was forced to camp at my snooty Aunts. A young woman in a hopeless situation becomes a Dragon rider and has to save the world. A beautifully written world full of villains and heroes and the ultimate enemy mindless hungry invaders from Space.
The parts in Fairy from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell we’re transporting. When I think about that book it feels like a different life, in a magical way.
This is how you lose the time war had me swooning the whole way through.
Madeline Miller, Barry Lopez, and Annie Dillard have all put me in a pink haze in love with the English language and the human condition. Making the mundane sacred.
I’ve read many magical novels that made me fall in love with reading all over again (could never just pick one), but I’m currently rereading Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. Utterly transports me to the land of dark, old school fairy magic and pristine white snow, bare trees, and sleighs. The structure is such like a fairy tale too, that it just reminds me of being read to when I was little, that feeling of being huddled under a blanket and just getting sucked in to a story centuries old. It’s incredibly visual. Not to mention the three female leads, who are all fantastically complex and archetypal at the same time. Magical book to read in December.
Lolita, no contest. I read it for the first time in my high school book club and I still have the same copy almost two decades later. I would cry if I lost it, even knowing I could easily purchase another.
Vladimir Nabokov is a masterful prose stylist, and in Humbert Humbert he created the most compelling unreliable narrator of all time. HH is a despicable, detestable predator, and yet so often throughout the novel it is easy to lose sight of that and pity him, all because of Nabokov’s skill as a writer.
“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
Practical Magic
The Goblin Emperor