Wow, it only took me eight days to read this. I feel like I was reading it forever. Actually, that’s not always a bad thing to say, though it certainly sounds bad. Sometimes I feel that way about a book if it’s a slog, but sometimes I feel that way if I was really sucked into the world and I’m having trouble pulling my head out of it again. I think this may be more of the latter than the former, here, though the book […]
The Hidden Chamber
I got on the library queue for this book because I knew that it contains “The Monarch of the Glen,” which is the novella follow-up to American Gods. I am committed to my American Gods love, and wanted to complete my library of knowledge of all things Shadow. But this book, oh, this wonderful book. It’s a collection of some of the most beautiful poetry and short stories, in perfect Gaiman-ian language, set in dark landscapes that are undeniably his. I could pick these works […]
Early Fantasy: Long Stories in Which Not Much Happens
Part of my Masters thesis is on the evolution of the fantasy novel. This means I had to delve into the pre-Tolkien works, which while important to the evolution of the fantasy process, is a scary place to go and, frankly they’re downright boring. I DNFed The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris at about the 20% mark since I could barely understand the sentence structure, never mind the plot, and slogged through The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany instead since it […]
My other theme this month is Fairy Tales
Toad Words and Other Stories is a collection of fairy tale retellings by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) most of which were published previously on her blog, though there is at least one new story. I’ve read a couple of the stories when they were on her blog, but there were a number that were new to me. I really enjoy Kingfisher’s approach to fairy tales, where magic may exist but that’s no reason to throw logic out the window. For the most part this book […]