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Re: RE: suggestions, please...
Hi there, Kogan, and thanks for joining us on WOTR, where your comments
will haunt you for the rest of...well, the day. Or something like that.
Yeah, yeah. Gimme a break-- I just woke up from a nap, and I'm still
cranky about my damn car.
So anyway: David Eddings' 15-book epic, starting with The Belgariad, was
very good. Though I must admit I bowed out after that-- he's gone on to
write some more, but I let that bus pass me.
Robert Jordan's series, I'm afraid, made me run screaming. I couldn't
handle the characterisations, which I felt were straight off the shelf.
That plus the "Get on yer horse, boy! The fate of the world hangs in the
balance!" theme one more time just made me blanch.
C.S. Friedman wrote some good books, but also some truly horrible stuff,
I think. This Alien Shore didn't do it for me-- structurally, I couldn't
get into it. And the way she handled the ending did nada for me, too.
I never read the Thomas Covenant stuff, but Stephen Donaldson's duo "The
Mirror of her Dreams" and "A Man Rides Through" were so good, I'm tempted
to go start them again right now. Yummy. Way yummy. Way WAY yummy, with
great characters and some great theories.
Oooo-- Ellen Kushner's "Thomas Rhymer." A retelling of the old tale.
"True Thomas lay on Huntlie Bank/A ferlie he spied wi his e'e...."
Jennifer Roberson wrote The Chronicles of the Cheysuli starting when she
was very young. She wrote in the forward to the new omnibus edition of
the first two novels that she thinks those first books are pretty much
juvenalia, and she's improved muchly since then. I'd have to agree,
though they are pretty good. I'm waiting for the next omnibus. Now, her
"Lady of the Forest" is fun. Another Robin Hood novel, but this time with
a really kick-ass Marian and a Robin who's very sexy in a realistic,
I'd-take-him-home-to-mom kinda way. Same for her hero and heroine in
"Lady of the Glen," which is an excellently researched "novel of
17th-century Scotland and the Massacre of Glencoe."
And if anyone's into graphic novels, well, all I have to say is
"Elfquest." I didn't understand until years later what all the fuss was
about a "well-drawn" series-- not until I saw all the crap that's out
there that'd give Picasso nightmares. Man, that Wendy Pini chick can
draw! Wooty woot!
Unrelated rant: what's with the idea that if you're cute enough, or hip
enough, you can have your strip in the newspaper? The Philly Inquirer
added two strips recently that have little to no redeeming value most
days, yet we still have that damn overused Family Circus to contend with.
One new strip is so obviously a Calvin & Hobbes red-headed stepchild, but
without the insight or wit. Another might be okay if the artist had ever
taken even a single life-drawing class, or might consider drawing with
something a little finer than a poster-sized Magic Marker. </rant.>
Jan, where are you? Didn't we have a deal?
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