Death by Owls: 2019

December 31, 2019

“Reading this at the age of 13, I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language. Fantasy is death by owls. It’s mourning through gesture. It’s music, incantation in half-light. An inverted heart.”
— An excerpt from one of my favourite things: this utterly timeless article by Sofia Samatar on the rich language of fantasy and how it crafted her into a writer (with reference to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast)

So I was going to bring in the bells with a book of the year post but then I did the math and concluded this mythic golden tome is, in fact, also my book of the decade.

One day I will express in coherent words just how much it means to me…⁣⁣

I agonised at great and laborious length over the shortlisting, but I can now definitively declare that my top 5 books of the 2010s stand, in publication order, thus:⁣⁣⁣

⁣⁣⚔️ A Dance With Dragons by George RR Martin (2011)⁣⁣⁣

“The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother’s milk. Darkness will make you strong.”

🎨 The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)⁣⁣⁣

“In the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”

🕷 Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015)⁣⁣⁣

“Let others become gods of mere single worlds. She herself would stride the stars and head up the pantheon.”

🔥 The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang (2018)⁣⁣⁣

“She had not just altered the fabric of the universe, had not simply rewritten the script. She had torn it, ripped a great gaping hole in the cloth of reality, and set fire to it with the ravenous rage of an uncontrollable god.”

🐉 The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon (2019)⁣⁣⁣

“To be kin to a dragon,” Nayimathun said, “you must not only have a soul of water. You must have the blood of the sea, and the sea is not always pure. It is not any one thing. There is darkness in it, and danger, and cruelty. It can raze great cities with its rage. Its depths are unknowable; they do not see the touch of the sun. To be a Miduchi – to be human – is not to be pure, Tané. It is to be the living sea. That is why I chose you. You have a dragon’s heart.”