30 Day Book Challenge – Finale

OK, so technically it’s going to be a 28-day book challenge.

I used this as a way to train myself to post something here daily, and I feel that it’s served it’s purpose, so I don’t feel the need to continue past the end of the month. I’m going to switch over to actual, y’know, CONTENT, starting tomorrow.

So for my final challenge, I’m taking the least-worst of the (frankly weak) final questions, and going with: Favorite book of all time.

And, fair warning: I’m cheating a little bit. I’m treating Stephen King’s Dark Tower series as a single book.

I figure that’s allowed, because it’s a complete epic narrative, although it wasn’t split into multiple books from a longer work (like Lord of the Rings), it was built one installment at a time, over decades.

More importantly, I absolutely love it.

Which is the point, after all.

30 Day Book Challenge, Day 27

Today’s challenge: Most surprising plot twist or ending.

It’s almost become a cliché now, but I’m going to go with the execution of Ned Stark toward the end of A Game of Thrones.

I’d read a lot of Big Book Fantasy, and the set up was all there: Ned in trouble for sticking to his principles, about to be executed in public, members of his family in attendance… I thought I knew where this was headed. A last-minute rescue — I mean, as far as I knew, Ned was our main protagonist.

Nope. Off with his head. My expectations were gone.

And sure, now the idea that George R.R. Martin will gleefully slaughter the characters that you care about has grown to the point of self-parody, but at the time? I wasn’t expecting it, and I haven’t been shocked like that since.

30 Day Book Challenge, Day 26

Today’s challenge: A book that changed your opinion about something.

I always refer to this book as “the book that radicalized me.”

Intellectually, I knew that the history we were taught in school was sanitized and, in the words of the old maxim, “told by the winners” — but knowing that, and reading it in black and white, were two different things.

This book is one of the contributing factors to why, despite the conventional wisdom that you grow more conservative as you get older, the exact opposite has happened with me.