Tom Mock

Sabriel by Garth Nix

Read by the incomparable Tim Curry

Books slip through the cracks of our lives somehow. I completely missed Garth Nix’s gothic fantasy Sabriel, even though I was born in 1988. It’s apparently my best friend’s most ever favorite book, but somehow she neglected to evangelize about it in the 16 or so years we’ve known each other. She says she stopped recommending it because her friends never seemed as excited about it as she was.

Dear readers, I find that hard to believe.

Chapter by chapter, I just kept saying, “This book is incredible!”

It’s been some time since I read something that felt so new to me. Nix’s dialogue is perfect, revealing of character, dramatic, humorous, everything I could ask for. His prose is full of terrific narration and creative similes. It’s active, revealing of the world, and focused on its protagonist.

I feel stylistically at times Nix is indebted to some of Tolkien’s prose, especially his similes, as well as the journey of intrepid heroes through a strange, lost land beset by necromancy. I felt very strongly parallels between the monstrous mordicant and the Belrog of The Fellowship.

I’m a big Lord of the Rings fan, so all this was immensely welcomed for me. Make no mistake, Nix has his own authorial voice. I found it infections.

Sabriel herself is such a wonderful character. Sometimes male authors can try very hard to convince the reader that they’re writing a female character. Nix does not fall into this cliché. Sabriel is a real person. There is nothing cliché about her, nor how other characters in this world of charter marks react to her. I was reminded of the protagonists of Hayao Miyazaki (also a personal favorite).

She’s great. She’s so heroic, but not because she’s trying to be a hero. She’s just trying to save one person who matters to her. She isn’t ready to face the challenges before her, but she can’t sit by and do nothing. That would be worse for her than anything else that could happen to her. She is so strong and so brave, not because she isn’t afraid or because she can do anything, but because she is afraid and is aware of her serious limitations but acts anyway.

The macabre magic of the Old Kingdom is such a delight. There are so many layers to it. The rivers of death into which Abhorsen and Sabriel can enter, the magical bells of Abhorsen that can bind the dead, unbridled free magic, the charter magic that beings order to chaos, the Charter Stones, the wall that contains the wild of the Old Kingdom, and more, and more, and more.

The more you read, the more story you find peeking around all the corners, but at the heart of the story sits the characters, magical and human and those who are human no more.

In so many ways for so many reasons, Sabriel by Garth Nix is my best book of 2025. This was an all time great reading experience for me. I loved every second of it. There’s too much in this relatively short book to be contained in this little reflection of mine. I can’t recommend it enough.

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin

Le Guin is so often incomparable. This novel is a sequel to A Wizard Of Earthsea. It is one of the most unique sequels i’ve ever read. The protagonist of the previous novel is left elsewhere. Tombs Of Atuan is set in the lands of a people who are largely an enemy of the people of the inner lands of Earthsea. In this land, there are no wizards. There is only the gods. The new gods of the God Kings, and the old gods: The Nameless Ones.

We follow Arha, the eaten one, as she grows in her servitude as High Priestess, learns the ways of the labaryth beneath The Place, questions whether the gods exist, and comes to realize she is a prisoner.

It’s a profound novel. You won’t find many fantasy novels that do what this novel does, especially because it takes place almost entirely in one place. It is a mysterious, claustrophobic novel, and yet it doesn’t stand still. There is a profound and largely unspoken tension throughout the novel as Arha grows.

And then it happens. Something changes.

It’s really terrific. Anyone who has not read A Wizard of Earthsea (also an amazing novel) could still pick this book up and have an incredible experience with it.

I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the Earthsea series. Le Guin’s world is so real and mysterious and wonderful. The stories live inside that world and within the understanding of the characters. The magic is as alive as they are. Her understanding of people and culture is also wonderfully on display here. And her writing is really some of the best put to paper.

I loved this book.

The Thief’s Keeper by Kyrie Wang

Sometimes we find the right book at the right time. This adventure novel was very helpful to me personally. I had several sleepless, difficult nights when I was up with and worried about our old dog, Marlo. This book was a friend I could turn to.

It’s a touching story. The characters seem to have the world set against them. All is not bad or wicked, tho, just challenging. They are just as often helped as hindered as our intrepid youths try to find their way and reunite a lost child with his high-born family.

The historical world details were a highlight of the story, especially those that Wang invents. She takes liberties with the time period that shift this from a purely historical text to something else, a near-historical fantasy. It isn’t a story of magic, tho. But it is a story with heart.

I really enjoyed it. It helped.

Thanks the thing about art, about books. It’s like medicine. You want to have a ready supply. You want it to be there when you need it, so don’t be shy about lining your shelves with books you haven’t read yet. You never know when the book you bought years ago will be just exactly what you need.

Summer Moonshine, The Small Bachelor, and Big Money by PG Wodehouse

These romantic comedies from Wodehouse were just such a delight. His style has such a pop and flair to it. Witty, quick, and full of delightful coincidences and reversals of fortune and characters falling in love at first sight. The characters are so precisely and humorously crafted.

I couldn’t put these down and I read all three in a row, one right into the next. They aren’t linked in any way except for their terrific, lighthearted tone. They’re all fairly short novels, but they were all delightful. As an example, one of Wodehouse’s favorite bits is having someone steal a characters clothes to keep them stuck and our of the way somewhere. Take a man’s trousers away, and he is locked up as surely as a convict.

The Lord of the Rings reread

I am always rereading The Lord of The Rings, it seems. It’s a transformative experience. I seem to see more of the story each time. I love the journey, the world, the environment, the mystery of so much of the story. I might almost be beginning to understand it. Who knows.

I’ve listened to both Andy Serkis and Rob Ingles read the books, and I think they both do a terrific job. Many fans of the films may find Serkis’s reading to be a particularly good entry point because of his familiar cadences and accents for the characters and because he very much performs the text dramatically. Rob Ingles, tho, remains my gold standard performance. It’s like a dream.

It is really nice to listen to the books read in part because of the poetry. Hearing a performer actually sing the songs has always helped me (an American) hear the world.

I recommend Corey Olsen’s Exploring The Lord Of The Rings podcast to anyone who would like to get to know the story better. It’s one of the most profound acts of literary scholarship and celebration I’ve ever come across. Professor Olsen and his dedicated explorers (on discord) have been painstakingly and lovingly going through the text line by line, paragraph by paragraph for years.

It’s a deep and thoughtful reading of the text that tries (and often fails) to stay grounded in what a first-time reader – and for that matter the hobbits themselves – would understand is happening as the story progresses.

Even if the podcast is too in depth for you, if you decide to read The Lord of the Rings, do your best to read the book instead of reading the book through your experience of the films. In many ways it’s a different thing, but the differences are no less dramatic and compelling.