Day 15

Day 15 - Your "comfort" book

To answer this question I would have to tell you that I don’t have one comfort book. It is more like a series. Yes, I have a comfort series.

My comfort books are the books from Gervase Phinn describing his life as a school inspector in the Yorkshire Dales. I love this series. Gervase Phinn has a wonderful way to describe so that the reader can imagine everything quite easily. When reading it I can see the Yorkshire Dales before me even if I've never been there in my life. 

His series starts when he gets the job as school inspector for English and Drama in North Yorkshire. Gervase gets to know his colleges who are hilarious people and are extremely funny, the secretary Julie who is fighting with Mrs. Savage the personal assistant of Dr. Gore, his chef and he also starts getting an impression about his work life.

Till now the series contain five books.

• The Other Side of the Dales
• Over Hill and Dale
• Head Over Heels in the Dales
• Up and Down in the Dales
• The Heart of the Dales

I can highly recommend this series to everybody. It is wonderfully written and quite an easy read but sometimes it is harder to figure out what the clever little kids mean when talking in Yorkshire dialect.

Day 13

Day 13 - Favorite childhood book OR current favorite YA book (or both!)

I wrote a lot about childhood books on this blog already so I will tell you what my favorite young adult book is.

This book is really my favorite YA book because it tells the story of Meggie, a young girl and her father. Both are so huge book freaks and every chapter starts with a short citation of a book. That’s so cool.

The book I am talking about is Cornelia Funke’s book “Inkheart”. It is a wonderful, fantastic book about Meggie and her father Mo. Mo has a special gift; he can read things out of books. But for everything he reads out of a book one thing from the real world gets into it. That is how he read out Capricorn, an evil man from Inkheart and in exchange his wife and Meggie’s mum Resa went into the book.

All his life Moe wanted to find a copy of Inkheart and try to read Resa out of it again but he never had any luck.

One day Mo gets warned that Capricorn is looking for him and his ability to read things out of books and Mo and Meggie flee to Elinor, Resa’s aunt. She is an old single woman who only has her book as company and doesn’t like kids which Meggie experiences firsthand. But Meggie kind of wins her heart because of her resemblance with Resa and her enthusiasm for books.

In the end, as it must be, Capricorn’s men find Mo and take him to Capricorn and the whole story gets really thrilling and fascinating.

“Inkheart” is the first book of a trilogy which also contains the books “Inkspell” and “Inkdeath” which are highly recommendable as well.

There is also a film with Brendan Fraser as Mo, Eliza Bennett as Meggie and Helen Mirren as aunt Elinor, which sticks rather closely to the original book and is worth watching.

Day 12

Day 12 - A book or series of books you’ve read more than five times

At first I thought this would be easy to answer but when considering that I already chose three of my all time favorite books which I read more than five times it seemed harder to answer.

After some minutes in front of my bookshelf I came up with another book I read more than five times. It is a wonderful children’s book – “Pippi Longstocking” by Astrid Lindgren. When I was a child I wasn’t that fond of it but as a teenager I learned to love this little, ultra-strong girl who lives all by herself in a large house with a monkey and a horse as company.

I think that everyone should read “Pippi Longstocking” at least once in his or her life – I can really recommend it.