What books are you reading right now?

The Belgariad Saga​

David Eddings​

​

For the umpteenth time...​

It's light fare...but there's something about it that hits me.​

Maybe it's the banter between characters. Maybe it's the archetypes.​

​

Starts with "Pawn of Prophecy"...and continues through 2 sets of 5 books each and 2 prequels.​

 

Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

 

Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice, Book One of the Farseer trilogy

&

Robert Jordan's Eye of the World, Book One of the Wheel of Time (on audiobook during dishes and transit)

 

Just began and finished The Orchard by Theresa Weir in a single day. It was okay.

 

In short, I'm not.

I've decided to abandon these. I've abandoned Jordan a total of four times now (New Spring twice; Eye of the World twice; once each with the book then the audiobook). I'm just going to stop trying to get into these kinds of books. I know why people like them (complex worldbuilding, interesting magic system, huge plots, etc.), but it isn't working for me.

I need to be wary of much of the epic fantasy out there. Many of them are as Ursula Le Guin would describe them—commodified fantasy:

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation.... It's unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable.... So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.​

​

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry.​

​

Commodified fantasy takes no risks; it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied...advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.​

​

—Ursula Le Guin, Tales of Earthsea, 267, xiii-xiv​

​

This is the same writer who stopped reading science fiction when it most of it came to be about military hardware. This is not to say that the Wheel of Time books fit Le Guin's words above to a tee, but I think I'm basically in the Le Guin camp, which makes it difficult for me to appreciate Jordan's work. I demand more out of what I read. I demand more out of myself as a reader. I want to be challenged. I want to read something unique and wondrous, not hackneyed and derivative. I want writing that is tighter like Le Guin's or T. H. White's, not overwritten like Jordan's, or even Martin's at this point in his series. I need quality writing and not just neato concepts, great battles, and cool magic.

So the problem with much of what I've been trying to read is the problem with commodified fantasy, which is something also covered by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. It means that I should try to stay away from the Jordans, as well as the Brookses, Feists, Eddingses, and Goodkinds. The appeal that Martin has, at least, is in the changing face of epic fantasy: It has turned much grittier and has tapped into realism. Martin's books also have a historical fantasy feel to them as well. I found the characters more believable and interesting. Though Martin's books aren't without their faults. The series degrades in quality past Book Three, A Storm of Swords. They become bloated, the plot turns in on itself, and the characters spin their wheels and become self-indulgent. I may have to give up on these books as well.

In the meantime, I'm going to focus more on the classics of fantasy that are understood as having contributed something to the genre, or at least as having qualities about them that make them stand out.

I just can't bring myself to read the Wheel of Time's some 11,000 pages when there are so many other pages I could be reading that will reap much greater rewards. Bringing myself to read nearly 800 pages of the first book even seems daunting, as I doubt I will get out of that book what I get out of books of relatively similar lengths, such as, say, The Once and Future King or The Lord of the Rings, or even the entire Fionavar Tapestry.

Does this make any sense? This isn't the first time I've expostulated on the fantasy genre. I need to learn my lesson and give up my attempts to like books I think I should like because other people like them. I need accept what I know I like and simply pursue that. I'm getting a better idea of that, I think.

And now back to Carter's Nights at the Circus.

 

If anyone has any good book club book recommendations, I'd love to hear them. We're getting ready to choose a new book. I'm going to suggest a graphic novel this time around as one of my three picks (V for Vendetta or Watchmen) but I am open to other suggestions for my other two picks. The only requirement is that it be less than 300 pages.

 

How about Joe Sacco's Palestine? It may have appeal considering recent news. (Oh, I just realized you're after picks other than graphic novels...but I'mma leave this suggestion here anyway.)

A couple of good books I always recommend for something a bit headier but still accessible are Don DeLillo's White Noise and Paul Auster's City of Glass.

 

Love, love, love White Noise, but I've read it like fifty times (and own three copies of it...) and given how well-read my book group is, I would be surprised if I was the only one who had read it. City of Glass sounds interesting, and Palestine looks like it would definitely appeal to my book club. Thanks, Baraka_Guru!