Meme: Top Ten Tuesdays: Top Ten Dynamic Duos

The Top Ten Tuesdays meme is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Please visit the mother blog and click on some (or all) of the participating blogs to see more dynamic duos.

After I drew up this list, I realised to my amazement that I had only put one romance supercouple on my list. This is perhaps because I decided to not include duos who are “just” great lovers, but who are also a great team in other respects.

Eve and Roarke from the In Death books by Nora Roberts. Not only are they a sizzling couple, they also work well together solving crimes.
Rincewind and the Luggage from the Discworld series. Together they can get into more trouble than a troop of street urchins and cause more mayhem than a reasonably large army of monkeys, but they always land on their feet again.
Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg from the Discworld series. One is sharply intelligent, openly powerful and intimidating, the other comforting and friendly and possessed of no less strong but much more subtle magic powers, they make up for each other faults and make one hell of a working team.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes stories. A perfect combination of brains and brawn.
Tommy and Tuppence Beresford from the books by Agatha Christie. Another dynamic crime-fighting duo, this one secret service/private detective/nosy parker types.
Jeeves and Wooster from the books by Wodehouse. One is an expert on getting into trouble, the other on extricating people from trouble and so they make a perfect match.
Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser from the books by Fritz Leiber. The sneak thief and the barbarian hero perfectly compliment each other, and the stories are just incredibly funny and inventive. If you want to read some of the best stuff ever written in the “sword and sorcery” fantasy subgenre, try the Swords series by Leiber.
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza from Don Quixote by Cervantes. I haven’t even read the book yet, only watched a TV series based on it, but I still feel I must mention them.
Merry and Pippin from The Lord of the Rings trilogy by Tolkien. Their relationship is no less strong that that of Frodo and Sam, but it’s a relationship between equals and thus the dynamics are different. In the movies they are comic relief, in the books the war might well have been lost without them.
Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Two great comic characters. Ostensibly the servants of Above and Below, but in reality champions of humanity and after 6000-something years on earth they have become rather more human than angelic or demonic.

Honourable mention:
Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings trilogy by Tolkien. A perfect example of a master-servant relationship turned into strong friendship.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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