📚 Ranking My TOP 10 Books of All Time

I think for me epic in epic fantasy this is as near a perfect example as I could imagine. This is just such an amazing example of what that genre can do by saying, 'Just because there's magic in the world, just because the lands are have names that you've never heard of, it doesn't mean it's not telling a completely attachable human story that you understand and have lived through yourself.'

It's just a perfect emotionally charged story about growing up in the world starting to understand what the world really is and realizing that there's more than a little bit of magic out there if you just open your eyes up to it.

It's a truly emotional journey about humanity and what story means to all of us. And it's complete alchemy of how he pulls it off.

This is just one of those books that when I picked it up, it expanded my mind. It made me think about things differently. It made me question things differently.

Each one of these stories hit me in a different way, and the structure of it all of how it's put together and how each story builds one off of the other to give you a deeper picture of this entire reality that he's building. The world building is off the chart on this because how each story it doesn't actually lead into each other, but just gives you just of a deeper bit of a peek behind the curtain of the entirety or the whole of the reality of what Dan Simmons is building.

I love the framing narrative of how it's told. I love the lush language. I love the interweavings of the artist's personal journey to understand after this great loss that she had.

Ray Bradbury is such a poet. Such an unbelievable lyricist of the strange and the ultra and the magical. The way he slings these words together and presents them to you on the page, it makes you draw in a breath...

This book, the way it hit me and the way it told me that this amazing heroic journey can come from any of us. From the most smallest, unassuming unsuspecting people can be the grandest heroes.

I love me some horror, and if this is the list of all things, all different genres, you know there's going to be some horror on here. But this is that look at this climactic fight between light and dark, good and evil. And that has always been such a draw for me.

This book was just such an amazing read for me because it just looks at the artist's journey in a way that I hadn't seen in fiction before as far as the passion and the obsession and the drive and what that cost you and what it takes.