pileofgreybooks: a book ring

Ugh. This was a short story in a recent issue of the New Yorker, and it stank!! It was about this old guy who was hit by a car and has his leg amputated and all the stuff that follows. Granted, it had a great beginning and some moments, but it was so damn long and wandering. I'd maybe expect it from a first draft, but not a published version--and in the New Yorker, for God's sake! Maybe the fiction editor got together with the poetry editor and decided to publish some bad fiction with some bad poetry! Although, one of the poems was great. Which is a rarity. I can't believe with all the hungry writers out there, waiting for their break, this person was sent to the front of the line.

I put off reading the wheel of time series in college, choosing to “suffer” through long, tedious discussions full of mysterious, nonsensical terms like Aes Sedai, Dragon Reborn, Egwene and so on. It was not until the first weeks after my graduation while stuck in Atlanta with my family that I decided to pick up the first book…I was hooked.
I never really read Fantasy as a child (with the exception of a onetime reading of the Sword in the Stone), I was more into Sci-Fi (Arthur C Clark, Niven and Pournell), older books (Vern, Wells, Doyle, London (I fucking loved Jack London)), Techno Thrillers (Clancy (gasp)) and the occasional Grisham and Crichton novel. There was no history for me to rely on when I dove into the epic fantasy world—I did for a short time have a copy of the Hobbit, but I gave it away and read Robinson Crusoe instead (I have also since tried reading the Lord of the Rings books, but they are just so quaint and I really don’t like the style…sorry).
Jordan, while at times, can be tedious (the whole man vs woman thing gets old) and some of his characters become almost unreadable (Elayne…uhg), he is undoubtibly a master storyteller of complex engaging tales. You want to read not only to find out what will happen, you read because you are trying to figure out what will happen before it happens. And even if you have read them before (this is the fourth time for me) they are so long with tiny hints spread throughout thousands of pages that it is easy to forget what happened at the beginning by the time you get to the end. This time I am trying as hard as I can to fly through them—to outrun my bad memory for details so that I can have a better idea of the story for the upcoming next book in the fall (I am a geek I know). I of the four books I have read so far the last one The Shadow Rising is my favorite…it is the longest of all the books (as far as I can tell) and it starts off pretty slow, but by the time you get to the middle it is hopping. This is the book where all the characters transform (in typical fantasy epic styling) from country bumpkins to the badasses they were destined to become. Because of the character growth I feel that the series changes after The Shadow Rising. The story lines become more complex and the story arcs stretch out over the rest of the books. The story changes from a rowboat to an aircraft carrier…any movement takes a lot of planning and groundwork. The later books are where this series stops breaks out of the Lord of the Rings mold and becomes its own story. Many of the fans who loved the early books have a tough time relating to and making the shift along with the later books in the series. Personally I believe this is where the series becomes cool.

I think I did the whole reader's binge thing. I read too many wonderful books in too short of time (at least for me--I know Teddy reads like a mo' fo'), which destroyed any pleasure in reading that wasn't up to that same speed. I tried and tried to read Henry James' The Wings of the Dove, but his prudish, early 20th century, take-ten-pages-to-say-she-sat-down prose just didn't cut it for me. So, goodbye for now, Henry. But I finally got around to reading Maus I and The Hedge Knight, which are graphic novels. Since I read Persepolis this spring, I've been amazed at this genre. Maus I had a kind of immediacy that brought the realities of life during the Holocaust to my senses that I cannot describe. I need to get my hands on Maus II. The Hedge Knight was just plain old swashbuckling fun. Underrated squires and evil princes and good princes and a maiden in distress. Plus, it was written by George R.R. Martin, who has created the first fantasy series (A Song of Ice and Fire--the fourth novel is set to come out this fall) I've enjoyed in this life.