We have all of us been swept away by this new album that Taylor Swift popped out and I can say that those songs have made me feel a lot. Especially the tone of the whole album really is right up my alley. It has a sort of nostalgic and wistful tone and then there’s the usual Taylor Swift oompf to it.
In any case, I saw a couple of posts and videos popping up with this tag and I knew I had to get on this as well. So, here’s the folklore book tag!
Declare the rules and list of prompts in your post
Thank whoever tagged you and link to their post.
I guess, it’s not quite the book ending so much as near the end that left me speechless. It would be The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. Something happens near the end that totally blew my mind because I simply wasn’t prepared for it. I loved and hated it at the same time. Those who’ve read it would know what I am talking about, I hope. I guess I loved that Sanderson was brave enough to do that and hated that Sanderson was able to do it. It all sounds very vague but spoilers, you know? I guess for this one, I have to pick The Unseen World by Liz Moore. I picked this one because this book made me feel so much and so many times I was happy and sad for the main character and her dad, it just….yeah. This book perfectly encapsulates this prompt, I think. If you haven’t read it yet, please do! It’s so brilliantly written. I still think about it sometimes, out of the blue. I am unsure which book to feature in this one. I have two that totally fit the criteria. The first one would be Vicious by V. E. Schwab, it would be because it’s such a well written and fast paced book with engaging characters and interesting plot. On the other hand, Radio Silence by Alice Oseman also fits the bill, you know? For completely different reasons. Its characters are its strength and what brilliant way Oseman managed to tell the story of Frances and Aled. As soon as I looked at my Goodreads, I knew which book it would be. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. God, I truly wish I hadn’t read this one because my opinion about this author wouldn’t have formed at all. I haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale because of the casual shaming of other women really bothered me. For an author revered for being a feminist, this one really let me down. I am not saying that she’s supposed to be perfect but my first impression really didn’t make me want to read anything else by the author. Oh, god. I am an easy crier. I guess, the most I cried while reading a book and was actually traumatised for a few hours was when I read We Are the Ants by Shaun DavidHutchinson. This book, while absolutely brilliantly written, is so heavy and deals with so many themes that can be triggering that it took a bit to recover, if I am being honest. I was also at a point when my mental health had just began to be better and then I read the book. I am not saying that it made my mental health worse or anything, it just didn’t help is all. I am not sure if I could read it again any time soon. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. I loved The Night Circus and Morgenstern’s writing in that novel but I fell in love with The Starless Sea. It’s just whimsical enough for me to thoroughly enjoy it. I absolutely loved the imagery and the idea of a sea and the secret society and the a place underground where people go to find ‘more’. It’s just enough to draw me in and add to that, Morgenstern’s writing. Yeah, that one was super easy to pick. I hesitated over this one because there’s a very glaringly obvious series that I might have mentioned. I will mention The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien however because I just love this author’s books to bits and pieces and I had to get a one reference to Middle Earth in this tag somehow. So, here it is and I am being honest when I say that this book does make me feel nostalgic because even more than the other series that I won’t mention, this trilogy made me fall in love with English fantasy because otherwise, I was reading Marathi books more than English ones. So, yeah. The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty or more like the entire trilogy really. The Daevabad trilogy was devoured during the summer and at this point, it feels like that’s all I remember from this summer for some reason. I loved it so much and well, I associate it with summer now apparently. So there you go. Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia is the only book that comes to mind at the moment. It dealt with loneliness and anxiety and a certain sadness so well that I related to it far more than I thought I would. I went into it expecting to read something else than what I actually ended up reading. So, that was a pleasant surprise. Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. It was my first Sanderson book and I clearly was not expecting that awesomeness level. I am, still to this day, thinking about that book and how it was the first book that got published by Sanderson and how for a first book, it’s actually so bloody great and well written. I doubt I would be over that book anytime soon. So many books come to mind but the first that comes to mind is Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. It is one of the softest and bestest books I have read, okay? It just….it touches your soul and uplifts it and makes you feel things, okay? Just, if you haven’t read it yet then please, go and do it and then come back and tell me about your feelings about it. I am sure you will have quite a few of them. Fortunately, I have read quite a lot of books where the female characters were done so well that I loved them too much. However I can only name one of them here, so I suppose it has to be Nahri from the Daevabad trilogy. One of the best characters I have read about in a while, she’s not perfect, god knows but there’s depth to her and strength that is unlike the usual ‘strong female characters=strong warrior’ equation. She’s canny, she’s definitely far from innocent and she’s pragmatic while being warm. It’s just great to read her, okay? She’s complex and sometimes you want to smack her but we still like her. The Book of M by Peng Shepherd. It is sad and quietly horrifying and at times, you feel like one of the characters, losing control of their emotions and lives. her writing is so vivid and gripping too! It starts out slow and quietly, slowly building up it’s pace and near the end, it is frankly phenomenal.Uh, what kind of tag would be complete without talking about The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller? If we are talking about yearning and not thinking about this book then we went wrong somewhere in life. God. This book. It’s just….I can’t put into words what I feel for this book and I probably wouldn’t be able to do it justice anyway. So I won’t try. I’ll just it’s Achilles and Patroclus and stop. Samwise Gamgee. That hobbit was something else, he is just one of the greatest and perhaps the quietest of heroes that I love. He’s not outwardly your typical hero but he’s a hero anyway. There’s an essay I could write as to why Samwise Gamgee is the best but I shan’t do it here. It would be rude to do that, right now, I guess. If you have read or watched The Lord of the Rings, then you know why I put him here. Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. It is possible that this is entirely on me and me not really understanding a lot of the subtle things that might have been there but frankly, I just couldn’t muster up enough love for this book. There’s just quite a few things about it that I couldn’t overlook no matter how hard I tried. I don’t how I finished this book but I did and I am glad for it because I generally don’t like to DNF books but god, I was so close with this one.
+++++
And that’s it for this tag. I loved doing this one and while a couple were a bit hard to choose, I did end up choosing the right ones in the end. If you haven’t done this tag yet then consider yourself tagged! Have you read any of the books I mentioned here and do your opinions differ from mine? If so, do tell! Spill all the tea in the comments.
Welcome to BookwormMuse, a blog where all I do is either babble about books or sometimes I am sane and review them properly.
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bookwormmuse 
Such a fun tag
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