Hello, Hivers! I’m late to the Hive Book Club contest of showing our home libraries and talking about our favourite book, but I love the contest so much that I’m just going to go right ahead and do it regardless. So here I go!🏃🏽♀️
I’ll be talking about fiction only, guys. So, I’m currently at my school apartment. Here, the books I have are the few that I’ve been collecting since I started uni. A couple of them — five, to be exact — are outside with friends, the rest hardly fill a shelf.
I’ve not been buying a lot — books are pretty expensive. Actually, it’s now that I’ve begun to buy regularly. When I started uni, I’d wait till it was time for the trade fair to shop for gently-used novels at the book stalls. That was how I got my novels. Recently, I started shopping on the online store of the book shop I usually buy from during the trade fairs. Their shop is just a short ride from where I live so I don’t have to pay for delivery or spend so much money transporting myself to their walk-in store and back. And I get lovely books at crazy prices!😜
I’m going to make a confession now that many of these books haven’t been read. From my last purchase, I’ve read only two. It’s like for every one hard copy novel I read, I read 2 ebooks, if not three (my TBR list there is longer than that here).
Anyone can spot the pitch black cover of J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Ring is the first book in the trilogy. It’s one book that I cannot give out. Then, there’s Jojo Moyes’ Me Before you. I fell in love with the story when I saw the movie, and had to cop a copy when I saw it was available at the bookshop. I’ve not got round to reading it though. I only read the first three pages when I got it because I couldn’t resist not doing so. I plan on getting the sequels soon so I can read all three together.
Maeve Binchy’s Minding Frankie was one of the first books I bought when I started uni. It’s been lent out so many times that the cover is peeling off in so many places. The last three books are YA, The Perks of being a Wallflower having a movie adaptation.
Jane Austen Stole my Boyfriend is a historical romance about the life of Jane Austen and her cousin in their early teenage years. It’s based on real events. It’s Jane Austen’s cousin’s diary and she writes about her life with the Austens and how she’s able to end up marrying the love of her life.
Seeing John Green’s works sitting pretty in this stack gives me so much joy. I enjoy his writing. Let it Snow is not all his work though. It’s a collection of three stories that intertwine with one another by three different writers.
Having taken you through my books, it’s time to present my favourite. Although, I find it difficult picking a favourite from a group of things that I love, for some reason, I chose The Hobbit in no time.
This masterpiece is a prequel to The Lord of the Rings. It’s set 60 years before Frodo in the sequel embarks on his journey to destroy the ring. In The Hobbit, we are told Bilbo Baggins’ story — how he left his home to assist the Dwarves reclaim their ancestral home that the dragon, Smaug, had taken over.
Chapter 1 begins:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends 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.
Tolkien is a master of world building. There’s so much detail infused in the story.
One thing I enormously enjoyed while reading the book was the songs. And there were so many of them. The Dwarves sang this one while in Bilbo’s hobbit-hole the night before they started on their journey:
Now that I’ve begun to go on about the The Hobbit, I can’t wait to delve into the The Lord of the Rings.
*Thanks for staying till the end, guys. Till next time, ciao!
All images are mine, unless stated otherwise.