I can’t believe it’s October already, not to mention yet another IWSG Day!

October 5 question – What do you consider the best characteristics of your favorite genre?

I’m an unabashed fantasy fan, and I’m currently reading a couple of really great takes on the genre: Stephen King’s Fairy Tale, and Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik – (that book about broke me, not gonna lie.)

There are many things I love about fantasy. I love imagining strange and beautiful and terrifying new worlds.

I also love the diversity of approaches. You have high fantasy and urban fantasy, dark fantasy and epic fantasy and so on.

Of all these things, what I love most about fantasy is that reading fantasy (any fiction, but for me especially fantastic fiction) Makes Us Better People. Why? Because it helps to expand our minds to read about people and worlds different from our own. (Discover Magazine: How Reading Fiction Increases Empathy and Encourages Understanding)

Really great fantasy does more than just entertain and make me laugh and cry and shout. Great fantasy helps us to look at racism and poverty from a different angle. After all, if we can believe that this half-unicorn or ogre is a real person with feelings, it makes it that much easier to believe the same about that person who looks or thinks or talks or smells or acts different from us.

This is true of all reading, but I find it especially in fantasy. That is what I most love about it.

What about you? What is your favorite genre – and why?