Diana Wynne Jones is one of my favorite authors in all the land. In her long career as a writer, she has written around forty books (novels and short stories), mainly for children and young adults, and each one is new and weird and wonderful in its own particular way. She has been compared to J.K. Rowling, in that her books are set in fantasy worlds and are full of humor and charm; she has inspired many writers over the years, including two of my favorites, Neil Gaiman and Megan Whalen Turner. If you’ve been reading here for a while you’ll know that I love Diana Wynne Jones, and once I get started shrieking about how great she is, it’s difficult to make me stop. I want everyone to read her books, which have given me so much joy over the (something like) ten years that I’ve been reading her books.
To that end, I will be hosting a Diana Wynne Jones week from 1 – 7 August. To participate, just read one of her books and post a review during that week! I will be collecting links and writing my own reviews and remarks about her too (failing some sort of alarming computer failure, which (knock wood) I don’t anticipate). If you haven’t read anything by Diana Wynne Jones before, I will be only too happy to recommend a good book to start your Diana Wynne Jones fandom. There are many to choose from.
The button for this event uses a particularly beautiful illustration of Howl’s Moving Castle, one of my favorite Jones books, in three pleasing sizes. I’m using it here by kind permission of the artist, Finnish illustrator Sami Saramäki – feel free to add it to your sidebar!
I am well excited about this – I checked out loads of Diana Wynne Jones books from the library in anticipation, including (y’all, if you had seen how excited I was to get these two books, you would have thought I was such a dork) two books about Diana Wynne Jones’s writing. I love reading criticism, because apparently being an English major in college makes you an English major FOR LIFE.