Eleanor
@eleanor_reads✦Patron
English teacher. Believer in the transformative power of stories. Quick Takes are my love language. Press Into Hands is my favorite feature.
Top Shelf
The Song of Achilles
“I teach this every year. Watching students discover Patroclus breaks me every time.”
Piranesi
“Clarke wrote a puzzle box disguised as a novel. My students adore it.”
The Haunting of Hill House
“Jackson invented modern horror with this book. The house is alive.”
The Fellowship of the Ring
“Tolkien understood that stories about small people doing brave things matter most.”
Currently Reading
Reviews
All 4 reviews →The Fellowship of the Ring
J.R.R. Tolkien
Read this when you need to believe that ordinary people can carry impossible weight — and that the friends who walk beside you are worth more than any magic.
The first half is brilliant — the museum bombing sequence is some of the best prose I've read. The second half meanders. Still, there are sentences in this book I've memorized.
Circe is the friend you wish you'd had in your twenties — fierce, lonely, learning to trust herself one catastrophe at a time. Madeline Miller writes mythology like it happened yesterday.
Klune walks a tightrope between saccharine and sincere, and mostly sticks the landing. The found family dynamics are earned, not forced. Linus's transformation from bureaucratic drone to fierce protector is the character arc of the year.
My one reservation: the 'magical minority as metaphor' framing can feel heavy-handed. But when it works — and it usually does — it works beautifully. Lucy's character alone is worth the read.
