The Book Dragon

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

— Neil Gaiman

For the past twenty years or so, I have had two people who bear the main load of talking books with me. The first is my sister, who still shoulders this responsibility, but while our tastes mesh a fair amount, we veer off from each other on about half of what we read. I read (and watch) much more horror than she does, and I am a staunch proponent of the so-bad-that-it’s-good theory in both books and films. We both like ‘classics’, but we have different ideas of what we categorise as coming under that heading. She’ll read literary fiction, whereas I tend to see a Booker Prize award as a big flashing neon sign to avoid it like the plague. She loved Twilight so much that she made me read it, too. That took a while to forgive – vampires don’t sparkle!

The other person was my friend, Lucy. Lucy and I met on a rat forum (yes, I said rats) a long time ago back, got on really well online, and discovered that we actually only lived a couple of towns away from each other. She became a close friend and, on top of the many other things we had in common, we were more or less book twins. It was pretty much a guarantee that if one of us read a book and loved it, the other would too. When I upped and moved to the other end of the country, she was very understanding and nothing much changed except for the distance.

Lucy’s been an integral part of my life for so long, and it never really occurred to me that this could change. But it did, in February when she suddenly passed away. This was just before the Covid-19 pandemic really got a foothold in the UK, so there wasn’t even the heightened awareness of our mortality that the virus has so kindly brought with it.

So, the book blog is an attempt to try to fill a tiny part of the hole that’s been left in my life since February. I don’t know if it will help, but it’s worth a try.