The Happy Place 5: Books You’d Take a Portal to in an Instant
The Happy Place 5 is a monthly series where a few friends and I post 5 of our favorites books for a certain topic or theme. The name is from a Discord group that I am a part of. We created the space to have a positive environment for a handful of close friends. All of us are bookworms, and many of us are bookstagrammers and bloggers. So we decided to start a blog post series together! I’ll link my friends blogs and posts for this month’s topic at the end of this post.
Aaaaand just like that, it’s March. Which means! Yes, it’s time again for The Happy Place 5! This month we are talking about “Places you’d take a portal to in an instant.” To be honest, this one was kind of hard for me. Mostly because a lot of the settings in the books I read seem really cool but also really dangerous or scary lol. I tried to pick books where I’d be okay living there if there’s no portal back. Buuuuut really, I’m making this post assuming that I can portal back home if I want to hahaha.
The Edge Chronicles
This is a middle grade series that is absolutely one of my favorites. The world is basically a swath of land that leads of the the edge of a cliff (hence the name) where you can literally fall off it and die. Or, well, no one really knows what happens if you fall off since you can’t see the bottom! But there are so many different environments of the Edge. A floating city on a big rock, towns deep in the woods, an industrial town, a huge marshland, and more. There are also SKY SHIPS!!! And tons of different creatures and species. It’s an incredible world, and Chris Riddell did the illustrations for it which are like my favorite thing ever. So yeah, I wanna go here.
The Queens of Renthia trilogy
The main land of Aratay in these books is a place where each village/town/city is built in the trees. Yes, you heard that right – TREE CITIES. Like treehouses but BETTER. The descriptions make it sound so beautiful. The cities are created magically, which means you can make any level of detail you want to have. I would love to live up in the trees! It reminds me a lot of the Ewok villages in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. There are also dangerous nature spirits in the forests, which would be kinda scary haha but cool to see.
The Tortall Universe
SURPRISE!!! Not hahaha. I couldn’t possibly not take the chance to visit the universe of my favorite author. Well, one of her two universes. Tortall is the main country in this particular universe, so we call it the Tortall universe. The setting is a pretty “standard” medieval fantasy setting. But!! There is magic, and magical animals (dragons, griffins, basilisks, etc), and more importantly. My favorite characters!!!! I would die at the chance to be able to go and meet them haha. If you wanna learn more about Tamora Pierce’s books, I wrote a blog post about them here!
The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica
I’m not sure if I know anyone else who has read this series (if you have, PLEASE tell me). But this is a wonderful fantasy adventure series, and it is FILLED with literary characters. By that, I really mean that like some of the characters include Captain Nemo, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, Don Quixote, and more. There are so many good ones that I can’t say for fear of spoilers! In the series, the main characters travel via dragonship (yes, DRAGONship), to a magical land that is mapped in the Imaginarium Geographica. It contains every fictional land you can think of. Ugh you guys I love this series. And can you imagine just, sailing and traveling to all of those places? And of course there are monsters, and cool creatures, and talking animals, and everything else fun.
The Invisible Library series
This series is about Irene, a “Librarian” who works for the “Library.” Yes, the capitalization is important. The Library is, well, a library, but it collects works of fiction from different realities. So yeah, multiverse!!! The Librarians can travel between these different realities/worlds. Each place has some level of magic (from none to WAY TOO MUCH), and some have dragons, and fae, and much more. Exploring the different places would be cool, but the Library itself is also amazing so it would be neat to just spend time there. I mean, books from EVERYWHERE. And it’s a MAGICAL library. I mean come on. What bookworm wouldn’t love that?
Do you think you’d take a portal to any of these places? If not, where would you go?
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