Blogfest 2009

*In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the end of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.*

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when my dad read me those lines for the very first time, but I still remember the magic of them, and the way they filled me up with wonder. I was only four or five, but from the moment I heard those first lines of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, I was a fantasy fan for life. I could *see* that hobbit hole, I could understand the everyday life of the hobbits inside it, and I knew for the first time that magic was real.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that The Hobbit is a really funny book, full of fabulously real characters, whether they’re powerful wizards or treasure-hunting dwarves, who get irritated at each other for utterly ordinary reasons and get grumpy when they’re hungry or it’s raining. That combination of real people and dazzling magic captured my imagination for life. I read The Hobbit and all three of the Lord of the Rings books over and over again, and from there I went on to read and love hundreds of other wonderful fantasy adventures, from CS Lewis’s Narnia books to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld comedy-adventures and, more recently, Sarah Prineas’s Magic Thief books. If a book had humor and truth and magic all mixed in together, I was a fan, and I still am.

But that wasn’t the only kind of book I fell in love with. A few years later, my parents pulled a double whammy: my mom gave me a copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and my dad read me Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. And I fell in love, hopelessly and forever. From that moment on, my very favorite fantasy setting was a real place and time: nineteenth-century England, and especially Jane Austen’s Regency era. I devoured every Regency romantic comedy I could find, and every Gothic romance, too. (In my book A Most Improper Magick, my heroine teases her proper oldest sister for having a secret love of Gothic romances. Guess what? I share that love, times a zillion. Some of them are so, so silly, and yet…yeah. Sigh. I just can’t help it.) Just like my favorite fantasy adventures, Regency romances took place in a world very different from my own, filled with wonderful characters and lots of humor – and they added a dollop of romance to make me even happier. They were only missing one thing: magic. And as I grew up loving the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer (especially The Talisman Ring and The Reluctant Widow) and Clare Darcy (Eliza!), I kept thinking, *if only they could do magic, too….*

So I guess it makes sense that, as an adult writer, I’m writing exactly the books I always wanted to read: Regency romantic comedies filled with magic and adventure.

What about you guys? If you could combine two different kinds of books, which kinds would they be? And what are your favorite books?