The Pottermore Presents E-Books, content by J.K. Rowling

Last year, Pottermore collected and published in 3 separate e-books the supplemental texts J.K. Rowling had written about Hogwarts and the wizarding world and its people. Although I was curious about these e-books, I held out for as long as I could on purchasing them in hopes that physical copies would be printed and available at my library.

Last year, I didn’t see the point in purchasing these e-books since their content were (probably are) available for free on Pottermore. However, this year I succumbed to my curiousity and purchased all three e-books because of the convenience of having all that content in one place and not having to click around on a website to find it. (I’d still prefer a physical copy of them, though.)

I was driven to these e-books by my craving for more stories set in the Rowling’s wizarding world. Though these collections do not contain stories, my craving were satiated by the short pieces within them that provided facts about beings, individuals, places, and occurrences at Hogwarts and in the wizarding world.

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Tough Travels #5: Strongholds

Tough Travels is a monthly meme that recommends fantasy books based on tropes, themes, and clichés cited in Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. The meme was created by Nathan at Fantasy Review Barn and is now hosted by Fantasy Faction.

Since I haven’t read many fantasy books, I instead create my list at the end of the month, after reading everyone else’s, and include recommendations from them that are interesting to me.

August’s theme (I’m late, again):

Strongholds

The Tough Guide offers information on various kinds of fantasy strongholds. For example, you might be looking for castles, complete with ‘frowning battlements, slit windows and multiple defensible spiral stairways inside’ and which ‘occasionally adorn the heights for pictorial effect’.

Or perhaps towers, which ‘stand alone in waste areas and almost always belong to wizards.’ Towers are often ‘several stories high, round, doorless, virtually windowless, and composed of smooth blocks of masonry that make them very hard to climb. The Rule is that there is also a strong no-entry spell, often backed up by a guardian demon.’