Our book-filled house is, like so many, home to rows and stacks of jeweled Fantasy volumes. Successive versions of touchstone works are there, thirty-year-old, dog-eared, and travel-worn paperback editions of The Hobbit nestled near hard-bound commemorative editions, one a delight for memories of how we read back then, the other a monument to what that book means to us in a grander way. The kaleidoscope of the many colored Fairy books are beguilingly resting on one shelf, just at a child’s eye level, and all of Narnia frequently sits in our daughter’s hand in one volume, perfect for days of rain or travel. Our bedside tables are towers of weaving bookstacks, where Patrick Rothfuss and Connie Willis beckon and invite among Arthurian scholarship and Margaret Frazier mysteries. Mighty buttresses of Robin Hobb, George Martin, and Robert Jordan fill whole shelves in a reassuring statement that in our house, for many reasons, fantasy does matter and always has.
