The best books in which reality and fantasy meet and meld

The second of LeGuin’s Earthsea books is a story made of fantasy, adventure, horror, mystery, and myth. 

Tenar, the high priestess must choose between her lifelong training and her unexpected compassion for a thief named Ged, who she must execute in the Tombs of Atuan. Tenar leads Ged through darkness and terror to a place where she decides who she will become.

LeGuin’s prose is direct, evocative, and compelling. Read out loud, the story is spellbinding. It stays with me even though it’s years since my first reading. Each time I return to the fantastic yet entirely believable world she created, the characters I meet reveal some fresh insight into what it is to be human.

I love Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar for its magic realism. For me, the story reads as real, even when it travels into the fantastic. Jess Wells’ writing is like music: it goes on singing in the back of my mind long after I’ve closed the book.

Jaguar Paloma is a larger than life woman in a setting that is more intense than everyday reality. Strong and vulnerable, audacious and cunning, Jaguar’s compassion inspires a splendid collection of men and women.

I was captivated by these stories from the moment I read the title of the first chapter: “In which Cimorine refuses to be proper and has a conversation with a frog.”

Cimorene is a young woman with no intention of being rescued by a knight in armour. She prefers the company of the dragon for whom she is princess in residence.  

These books re-imagine traditional princess stories through a woman’s eyes. Cimorene and her adventures are light-hearted, but as children (and parents who read to them) encounter wicked wizards, wonderful witches, magical carpets, swords, and castles they will celebrate this princess as the tough-minded lady Patricia Wrede has made her.

I have revisited Darkover Landfall often, but it never loses its hold on my imagination. It’s the Darkover novels’ origin story, telling what happens when an interstellar colonizing starship goes off course and crash-lands on an uncharted planet. In essence, this is Science Fiction, except that the earth-like planet has fantastic creatures, some of them with paranormal powers.

The castaways include a few hard-nosed scientific professionals who expect to lead many industrious generalists who plan to colonize a new world. All must recognize that the technology that brought them to Darkover will not sustain them unless they adapt, learn, and unlearn. It’s a story to make us wonder what we really need from our planet and each other.

The Hobbit—the book, not the film—is the perfect story for a father to read to his children at bedtime. It begins outside Bilbo’s underground home in front of its round, green door on which Gandalf scrapes a secret mark to be read by thirteen dwarves. Like Bilbo’s road to adventure, the story goes on and on, pausing regularly for father to tuck us in to sleep, perhaps to dream. Thanks to the promise of Bilbo’s subtitle “There and Back Again,” we close our eyes without fear of nightmares about trolls, dwarves, elves, goblins, spiders, and dragons. Night after night, reading after reading, Bilbo Baggins returns to surprise us with his courage, and ingenuity born of common sense.