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.

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

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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