Top Ten Tuesday #25

 

 Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week a new Top Ten list will be posted. Everyone is welcome to join. Link back to The Broke and the Bookish so everyone can check out other bloggers' lists. It's a fun way to get to know fellow bloggers.

This week's topic is Ten All Time Favorite Books of X Genre 

I'm going with Fantasy this week. It's always been my favorite genre- there's something about fantasy- the sense of wonder, the escapism of it, the chance to explore a new world with echoes of our own, but with all the fun stuff- dragons, elves

So here are ten fantasies that I think are pretty awesome. 

This is without a doubt one of my favorite fantasy books. It's huge, sprawling and there are so many great moments in it.  

The third book in the series and like A Dance with Dragons, there is just so much that happens in this one. 

The second Ice and Fire book this one takes the story into much deeper territory and has some amazing moments. The prologue especially sets the tone as we see just how mysterious the red priestess Melisandre really is. Plus Dragonstone!

For me not only is this a great conclusion, but I've always been fascinated by the period of time after the Lord of the Rings. The beginning of the Fourth Age, when man is ascendant and the elves leave- Aragorn Elessar's reign begins and the north and south kingdoms are reunited. I'd love to see how that develops- and the Appendices in this book give lots of hints. 

This book spends a lot of time in the Shire and that's one of the things I love about it. As a kid reading these all the build up and Shire stuff bored me, but as an adult I found that pastoral land to be fascinating and the images of it presented here are some of my favorites. The Old Forest, the sense that the Shire is a protected land and outside its borders is an encroaching darkness, the town of Bree- just amazing worldbuilding. 

 This is a very nice companion read to the Lord of the Rings. It provides background information on some of the fellowship members and what they were doing at various points before the quest, including Aragorn. There is a section on the Istari (the wizards) that shows where Gandalf and his kind came from, and it's just a wealth of information.