Smorgasbord Fantasia

Happy New Year folks!  It's the start of a new decade and I am super excited. Looking back at how 2019 has gone down for me, I mostly take pride. My total books read has hit 54 (That's a book every week!) with a few in various final stages as they stand today, on 31st Dec. What has helped that tally this year, is the advent of audio books in a big way in my life. I have managed to finish 13 audio books this year (A book every month!), which is phenomenal for me. Combing through this list, there are quite a few shining gems for the year, that I have loved to bits and would categorise as the best reads of the year. A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie: The return of the Lord Grim Dark to his brutal lawless world of the First Law trilogy was indeed, a welcome one.  The wheels of time are turning and an age of madness descends into this world.  A Little Hatred  features the sons and daughters of our intrepid 'heroes' of the original trilogy. Complex, twisted, n...

I admit, I have never read the Olympian Bound trilogy - the first series by Jordanna Max Brodsky . So I came into The Wolf in the Whale , fairly oblivious to Jordanna's amazing talent. Which kind of heightens the joy of having read this absolutely epic magnum opus. Jordanna picks up an off-beat little known account of a meeting between the Inuits and the first expedition from the Vikings land and then spins that off into a highly engaging, magical and sprawling epic full of timeless mythologies and peerless magic, building it up as a historical fiction that soars. In terms of the originality and the stunning language, The Wolf in the Whale stands way above many other books that I have read, in the recent past.  It is the story of the coming of age of Omat - a fearless Inuit hunter and shaman living on the edge of the world, living off the frozen nature and the bounties that the Ancient Spirits like Sea, Wind, Moon,Sun and the Animal spirits like the Wolf or the ...