Monday again! And a new Fantasy with Friends post: the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about libraries in fantasy:

Fantasy books often feature magical libraries that have anything from floating platforms to books with characters that come to life. What are a few of your favorite fantastic libraries?

I’m quite a fan of the library in Genevieve Cogman’s series that starts with the book The Invisible Library. It’s less about the magic itself being magical, though, and the sheer variety it offers: books from all kinds of worlds, both high magic and high sci-fi, including variants of the same stories unique to some of the worlds.

I never actually managed to finish it (got distracted, even though I was enjoying it, so it ended up back on my TBR), but I’m also a fan of the idea of The Library of the Unwritten, where books unfinished by their authors end up in a library after their death.

I don’t remember a lot about the library in Garth Nix’s Lirael, but it was one of the reasons I really enjoyed the start of that book, as Lirael learned to take care of the library!

More generally, I think my favourite magical libraries are not so much full of magical conveniences, but crammed full of books on all kinds of topics, with fascinating and mysterious titles. A big space to explore, full of books of all kinds, some of which may be magical, but mostly just numerous. Several times in my life I’ve picked a local library clean of the books that interest me, so huge libraries that seem practically unlimited call to me.