February's Fabulous Feast Of Fully Formidable Fiction

[Extollager]

It [The Worm Ouroboros] is one of those books that most modern readers have a lttle difficulty with because of that (and the older storytelling model), but once the adjustment is made, I think it repays the effort many times over.

Yet I made it through this book twice in my teens. It's not that I was such a great reader; it's that it really isn't all that hard of a read.

 

[j d worthington]

But then, you and I had both read a lot of older types of writing, including growing up with regular readings of the KJV Bible, where the language is fairly similar (though not quite as archaic as Eddison can be at times... he really is much closer to Browne, I think). In my experience, a lot of readers these days haven't had much experience with anything older than the pulp fiction of the 1940s and after (if that), save for some school courses where they generally hated the process... and, given the way such literature is taught so much of the time, I can't blame them. Hence, the "double whammy" of the older-fashioned structure and the archaic English is a bit more than they are able to take on board easily... though, personally, I found it much easier in Eddison than even Pratt's Well of the Unicorn (whose idiom I also quite like).

As far as the story itself... yes, it is a very simple, straightforward adventure sort of tale with plent of magic and fantastic creatures and events....

 

[jojajihisc]

A debut novel from John Love called Faith which looks good early on.

 

[Extollager]

But then, you and I had both read a lot of older types of writing, including growing up with regular readings of the KJV Bible, where the language is fairly similar (though not quite as archaic as Eddison can be at times... he really is much closer to Browne, I think). In my experience, a lot of readers these days haven't had much experience with anything older than the pulp fiction of the 1940s and after (if that), save for some school courses where they generally hated the process... and, given the way such literature is taught so much of the time, I can't blame them. ...

Good points, JD. I don't think I read the Bible much on my own in my teens, but I think the Bible as I knew it was usually the King James till 1973, when the New International Version appeared. I'd have been about 18. I recall some exposure, I think, before that, to the colloquial paraphrase called the Living Bible -- and that appeared shortly before the NIV (1971). So: yes, my ears and, a little anyway, eyes would have been accustomed to the language of the KJV/Authorised Version. For which I should be very thankful, even just on the score of literary and historical considerations as distinguished from others. Notoriously, children learn languages more readily than adults, and so, yes, Jacobean English -- not just vocabulary but sentence structures -- is still pretty easy going.

 

[Extollager]

Welcome to the forums Alex, The G and T.

Glad to hear you are enjoying "The worm Ouroborus", it is indeed a classic although not everyone finds the prose style so pleasant.

I'm thinking I may try to fit this in as a classic to reread, next month (with Morris's Wood Beyond the World) for February. An enticing prospect.

Has anyone here read any of Eddison's other writings? Or do we have others here who, like me, have carried around copies of the three other fantasies for years (getting on for 40 years?!) like me and have never yet read them?

 

[j d worthington]

I'm thinking I may try to fit this in as a classic to reread, next month (with Morris's Wood Beyond the World) for February. An enticing prospect.

Wish I could join you on that... I really, really wish I could join you on that... but as you know, I'm going to be rather preoccupied for a while now....

Has anyone here read any of Eddison's other writings? Or do we have others here who, like me, have carried around copies of the three other fantasies for years (getting on for 40 years?!) like me and have never yet read them?

As I mentioned above, I have... though not as often as Worm (in fact, if memory serves, I've only read The Mezentian Gate once, though always meaning to get back for a reread). And, though I would say that there are some things about them which are a bit more abstruse, I would, if anything, rate them even more highly than that... actually, a fair amount more than that, as they have more substance and are much more than simply adventure tales....

 

[Fried Egg]

I read "Mistress of Mistresses" but didn't enjoy it as much as I did the "Worm". I definitely want to read something else by him at some point though.

 

[Fried Egg]

I abandoned "The Dragon Waiting" by John M Ford because I just couldn't engage with the writing. Started "Chronicles of Shadow Valley" by Lord Dunsany.

 

[elvet]

I'm presently savoring Skirmish by Michelle West. It's finally picked up the story from the end of the Sunsword books.

 

[Fried Egg]

Actually, switched again. Ian Whates' "City of Dreams & Nightmare" turned up so reading that instead.

 

[Extollager]

I abandoned "The Dragon Waiting" by John M Ford because I just couldn't engage with the writing. Started "Chronicles of Shadow Valley" by Lord Dunsany.

Bought the Ballantine edition of the Dunsany as soon as it came out, with that attractive Bob Pepper cover --

But almost the only thing I remember from it is the wicked innkeeper. I had a special fondness for the next (and final) full-length Dunsany book that Ballantine published, The Charwoman's Shadow.

 

[Fried Egg]

Bought the Ballantine edition of the Dunsany as soon as it came out...

That's the edition I have (although I certainly didn't buy it when it came out!)

 

[Connavar]

Im reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Im reading so slowly, maybe 50-100 pages per week but still enjoyable book with fine writing. No lame dark continent clichè naturally.

 

[Extollager]

That's the edition I have (although I certainly didn't buy it when it came out!)

Rereading this book, I doubt that I could completely distinguish the satisfaction of reading what Dunsany wrote from the pleasure of reading this particular copy. That goes for some other books that I've held on to for so many years (and through quite a few relocations).

But really, even if I reread some long-familiar story (say one of Lovecraft's) in a new presentation, I'm sure part of the pleasure is the sensation of connecting with an old-time favorite.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this being an element of one's literary enjoyment, provided that one doesn't make excessive claims for a work based really on the personal memories that one brings to it. I suppose that experienced readers are often pretty well able to allow for this.

(Likewise, sometimes one may be unduly harsh in commenting on a reread former favorite. C. S. Lewis says something somewhere about people avenging themselves on their adolescences -- or something like that....)

 

[D_Davis]

When We Were Executioners, by J.M. McDermott

Sometimes there aren't reasons for things; sometimes things just are. This is true for the characters and story depicted in J.M. McDermott's book, When We Were Executioners, and true for the book itself.

Thus far, The Dogsland Trilogy is the polar opposite of high, epic fantasy. I'm not quite sure what the opposite of epic is, but in this case the narrative is super small and extremely personal, almost to the point of it being a work of pointillism.

The Dogsland Trilogy is low fantasy, very low, and also very urban. I'm not talking about urban in the sense of a Neil Gaiman or Clive Barker urban fantasy. This isn't cute-goth, or weird alt-London, or steampunk. It's urban in the sense of it taking place in the inner-city; it's urban in the same way that The Wire is urban. It's about the lives of a few people trying to get by, it's about whores and drug dealers, cops and criminals, addicts and politicians, all trying to live their lives with the cards they were dealt, while all around them the city, their very environment, chews them up and spits them out.

And the chewing gets nasty. McDermott punctuates this book with a few scenes of extreme, grotesque violence, violence that has a point, and violence that hits hard. It is graphic and hard to read, but never gratuitous. This is not violence in the context of action, or titillation, or excitement. These depictions of violence serve to illustrate the consequences of living in a city like Dogsland.

When you get right down to it, there isn't a lot going on plot-wise. It's basically a direct continuation of the first book, Never Knew Another, almost to the point of it being the same book. Things happen, but there isn't a grand, sweeping narrative with an exciting dramatic drive keeping the pages turning. It is, rather, a very small story about people, their lives, their love, and their survival.

And so what's the point of the book? What's the point of it being a trilogy? I'm sure if you simply examined the plot of the entire thing, you could easily tell the story in a single volume, perhaps in the length of a novella; the plot is not complex, at all. But some things don't need points, or reasons. Some things just are. This book exists simply to read about and spend time with a few fictional characters, not completely unlike people you might know, save for some of them being shape-shifters and of-demons. It exists to be read, and isn't this the ultimate purpose of all fiction?

 

[gully_foyle]

I finished Robots of Dawn by Asimov. A bit denser and wordy than the original series, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Not sure what to read next. Idly riffling through a treatise on Brisbane by Matthew Condon, but it assumes a degree of familiarity with the city that I don't possess.

 

[J-Sun]

I finished Robots of Dawn by Asimov. A bit denser and wordy than the original series, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Agreed. Some people dismiss all of Asimov's later writing, and things like Robots and Empire and Foundation and Earth (while I still liked them last I read them) are almost certainly are a step down, but Foundation's Edge and Robots of Dawn, while different, seem to me to be worthy of their great predecessors.

 

[dask]

I enjoyed his later fiction, more so than the swellheaded nonfiction that appeared in his mag. I might be the only person alive who liked the way he tried to meld his Robot/Foundation material into a single --- can't think of the word, so "thingy" will have to do.

 

[GOLLUM]

Im reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Im reading so slowly, maybe 50-100 pages per week but still enjoyable book with fine writing. No lame dark continent clichè naturally.

Interesting...

It will be good to read your overall thoughts on this classic of African literature.

You may also want to try and get a copy of Naghuib Mahfouz's quite brilliant EPIC saga The Cairo Trilogy. I have a Library of America copy in HB...currently I'm committed to my reading project on Charles Dickens but may take time out from this to revisit and review this work in the latter part of February.

Another that springs to mind J.M. Coetze's Disgrace..a very powerful work....and as mentioned previously Nardine Gordimer's The Conservative.

 

[J-Sun]

I enjoyed his later fiction, more so than the swellheaded nonfiction that appeared in his mag. I might be the only person alive who liked the way he tried to meld his Robot/Foundation material into a single --- can't think of the word, so "thingy" will have to do.

Superseries? I did at the time in terms of what it did in my head conceptually to extend the scope of it all. But the main problem even then was that R&E was basically written just to do that, rather than having something in itself that made it need to be written and accomplishing the welding job along the way. He did a pretty nifty job of doing it but there wasn't room for much else in the book besides that. And, while I love Asimov's dialogue-centric style, I wasn't so much a fan of Lady Gladia's looong monologue (if I recall her name correctly) - the speech before some governing body or whatever it was. It did get us Giskard and the zeroth law, though, which was interesting. And, of course, I was very entertained by F&E and loved one part of it especially (no spoilers but, IIRC, it was on/in the moon) but didn't much care for the ending. And, of course, at the time, I withheld any final verdict because I thought he would go somewhere with it but, of course, he never did. So, IIRC, I liked the later stuff at the time, but less in retrospect. But it's way past time for me to re-read them again and maybe I'll be able to be a little more definite.

And I loved the editorials and the occasional Viewpoint article and so on. And the occasional short story, too. My impression of them was that he sort of got forced into writing the later fiction books which he felt was hard work, whereas the non-fiction was easy (and short fiction at least less demanding than novels) and he had fun and that carried through in my impression of them.