A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin – The Shadow You Cannot Outrun

The Silmarillion is the special features DVD of Middle-earth. The deleted scenes. The director's cut. Harder to read. Worth every single page.

My favourite film of all time. I wanted it to be my favourite book. Then I realised it is one book, not three. And it is the best I have ever read.

Fellowship is better. I'll say it plainly. But Two Towers earns its place in ways that only the hardest part of a great journey can. Five stars.

Seventeen years in the making. A monster Tolkien couldn't control. Fellowship of the Ring is where the story finally understands what it is. Five stars.

Tolkien wrote the first line on a blank exam paper. What followed changed fantasy forever. Michael Morpurgo's Beowulf is the version this story always deserved.

Grendel. A dragon. An old king who knows he's going to die and goes anyway. Michael Morpurgo's Beowulf is the version this story always deserved.

The Prose Edda gave me the map of Norse mythology. The Poetic Edda dropped me into the territory itself — no guide, no handrail, just ancient voices coming at you sideways. It's rawer, stranger, and in its best moments considerably more powerful.

Before Tolkien. Before Marvel. Before almost every fantasy world you've ever loved. There was this — one Icelandic writer in the 1200s who decided to write down the Norse myths before they disappeared forever. Turns out it was the most important thing he ever did.

A prince. An exile. A abduction. And a war fought across an ocean to get one woman back. The Ramayana is the most focused epic I've read on this challenge — and somehow also the most uncomfortable.

The longest epic ever written. A family destroying itself. A war that costs everything. And somewhere in the middle of it all — one of the greatest philosophical texts in human history, just casually sitting there inside a bigger book.

Virgil’s The Aeneid is not just a continuation of Homeric storytelling — it is a shift in purpose. Where The Odyssey is about the struggle to return home, The Aeneid is about the burden of building one. Through Aeneas, we explore a hero defined not by glory, but by sacrifice, duty, and the weight of a future he cannot escape.

A 5-star reflection on The Odyssey—a story not of victory, but of endurance, identity, and the long road home. Where The Iliad explored what a man will die for, this epic asks what he must survive to return.

A review of The Iliad exploring rage, honour, and the cost of glory—revealing a story far less about war, and far more about the consequences of refusing to let go.

A deep dive into The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest recorded story, exploring mortality, friendship, and the timeless human struggle to find meaning in the face of death.