5 trips to the darker side of Fairyland

List by Danielle

'Ellum do grieve,

Oak he do hate

Willow do walk

If Yew travels late'

~ From Faeries

This is inspired in part by Scriven's fab selection of recent fairytales on the Auckland Libraries blog - including fairytale knits! - and in part by reading the wonderful Locus Award-winning The girl who circumnavigated Fairyland in a ship of her own making, by Catherynne M. Valente. I love fairytales, and I love it when authors take the old familiar settings, characters and motifs and make something dark and eerie and wonderful and new with them. I'm particularly fond of stories that give me a sense of the strangeness and power of Fairyland and its denizens. I think it *should* be scary - a trip to Fairyland should give you pause, should tempt and terrify in equal measure.

Also recommended:

• Wicked lovely, Melissa Marr's YA series - darkly beautiful, enjoyable if you've got a reasonable tolerance for angst and teenaged love triangles
• Erica Hayes' erotic Shadowfae series - flawed, and the characters aren't particularly likeable, but she has some nice imagery that gives you all the glorious tastes and scents of fairy life, alongside the crazy sights; especially in the stand-alone second book, Shadowglass
• Kissing the witch / Emma Donoghue - before she became uber-famous for the amazingly strong and unforgettable Room, Donoghue wrote this book of short interconnected stories that explore the relationships between female characters in fairytales
• Any anthologies from Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
• Victorian fairytales, French fairytales, fairytales in picture books... it's all good!

5 airship adventures for teens

List by Danielle

"Invention, my dear friends, is 93 percent perspiration, 6 percent electricity, 4 percent evaporation, and 2 percent butterscotch ripple."

~ Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Steampunk, wonderful steampunk! I've been reading my way through the YA category of this year's Locus Awards for sci-fi and fantasy, and two of the five books nominated this year have a distinctly steampunkish feel (though Ian McDonald's very enjoyable Planesrunner is actually 'electricpunk', taking place in a parallel universe where oil has never been used as a source of energy). All of the books below have plenty of adventure, interesting and imaginative settings, awesome steampunk technology and brave, smart, resourceful heroes and heroines. They're really good for readers who aren't scared of a little dose of science with their fiction - a little bit of 'how the rollercoaster works' alongside the whole rollercoaster ride. All that, plus - airships! Air pirates! Mid-air battles!

Top 5 most requested titles for November 2011

List by Tosca

"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting."
- Henry David Thoreau

I bet you thought we forgot all about our regular Top 5 most requested titles list, didn't you? We didn't! I've also added review comments where we have them listed in the catalogue. Which reminds me, I meant to ask: Did you know that you can look up reviews and author notes from within our catalogue? If you see a book that you're interested in *and* it has a picture of the cover attached to the record, click on the picture. You're then directed to an Additional Information page, and it's here that you'll quite often (*but not always*) find links to reviews, author notes, and excerpts. You can test it out now: click on this link to practice (and yes, I'm making you look at this book because it is full of WIN and BECAUSE I CAN).

Top 5 teen action/adventure series

List by Danielle with help from Jolene, Debra, Richy, Tosca and numerous MANIX reviewers

'I wanted to keep turning the pages after the book had finished.'
~ Omkar, MANIX Teen Reading Challenge

Firstly, there were plenty of awesome candidates for this list, and there are some highly recommended edge-of-your-seat series we'd like to give honourable mentions:

• Boy soldier sequence / Andy McNab
• Maximum ride / James Patterson
• Daniel X novels / James Patterson
• Chaos walking / Patrick Ness
• Hunger games / Suzanne Collins
• Young Bond / Charles Higson

We'd also like to draw your attention to two excellent but less well-known action series; The guild of specialists, by Joshua Mowll, and Chris Morphew's Phoenix Files.

And if you're looking for an injection of knuckle-whitening, page-turning action and adventure, look no further!