Welcome to our last Throwback Thursday with Wyrd &Wonder!

It’s been five years of W&W and one of the ways we’re celebrating is by looking back over the last five years of photo challenges!

Each week, we’ve been taking a look at something different, and our favourite responses (not necessarily just our own).

For our last week, it’s a bit of a free for all! Let’s look back at some of our favourite W&W prompts over the years and our responses to them.

Julia

I have a couple of favourite prompts or favourite pictures from even just those two years!

A Friend In Need was a great prompt, as I love a good friendship in books. The banter and unconditional loyalty is something I’d love to see a lot more off!

As You Wish – Romances was a favourite, because I don’t usually like romance in my fantasy, so it was a good challenge to think of one I enjoyed! And I also really like how the picture turned out… I’m easy to please!

Fond Farewells was a great prompt both to end W&W and because I have really love a good day nding to a series that just hits the spot.

I loved the “Around the world” prompts because it brought so many new authors and books to my attention I had never heard of! It also started me on my quest to find ever more diverse reads…

And then my first ever shelfie. I spend a whole afternoon working out how to get all those shelves on a square picture, and still have the pics big enough to see the titles. I ended up doing and redoing collages for the whole evening and ended up with a insta feed mosaic bin still proud of a year later!

Nils

I really like the #stacksaturday prompt, mainly because for two years Beth has made me laugh with how amazingly tall her stacks were!! 

This is from 2021 and was Beth’s tbr stack!! It’s taller than me!! 

This is from 2020 and amazed me the most! Look at all those delicious Orbit books!! 

I also like the 5 star reads prompt. This is from 2021 and I predicted both of these would be 5 star reads and they actually were! 

Beth

Aw thank you so much for picking my stacks as your favourite posts Nils! I feel pretty bad that I haven’t done one for this year now 🙁 I dread to think how big my orbit one must be now!

It’s hard to pick just a couple of favourite prompts from over the years; I’ve made myself just pick one from each year, but I can’t stress enough how fun I find this month, and how grateful I am to the hosts. The first prompt I’m going with is “Judge a book by its cover” from 2018. I went with my husband’s edition of LotR which, as you can see, is very well loved indeed, and an edition of the Hobbit I found in a charity shop which dates from the 60s!

For 2019, I went with The Blade Itself for the prompt “Unexpected Wizards”. For a start, I love that the wizards are unexpected! And I went with Bayaz because I remember distinctly the first time I read this book, not far off the back on working through all of Edding’s Belgariad and Mallorean and the standalones, being completely taken in by him. He was most definitely not what I expected at all.

For 2020, like Julia I also went for the “Friend in Need” prompt (I very nearly went for the “As you Wish” prompt – my response was Nicholas Eames’ Kings of the Wyld). The fantasy genre as a whole is a wonderful one for friendships, it forms the backbone of so many stories. From the Fellowship, to Harry, Ron, and Hermione. There’s something about “finding your people” that is a recurring and comforting theme. I went with Jen Williams’ Black Feather Three – the holy trinity of Wydrin (murder baby ftw), Sebastian (cinnamon roll babe) and Frith (he’d hate a nickname, but equally hate not having one the grumpy pants).

Finally, I went with “You Had Me At Hello” for the 2021 prompt and Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became The Sun. I was super fortunate to receive the proof edition, which was black and gold and bloody gorgeous, but – although I am super shallow – what made me choose this book for this prompt was that the blurb also well and truly hooked me.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our forays into Wyrd and Wonders gone by!