flemmings | 50 Fantasy Books Meme

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50 Fantasy Books Meme

In which I continue to spam my own journal and be shamelessly opinionated

1. George MacDonald, Phantastes, 1858

Always comes in a double volume with Lilith. I know I've read Phantastes, though I remember nothing of it, and believe I haven't read Lilith, though I remember passages from it.

2. William Morris, The Well at the World’s End, 1896

I suppose we could do with an historical note here. All these early fantasy titles were reissued in the mid to late 60's following on the huge success of LotR. The books were beautiful, the cover art haunting and suggestive (caveat- for people who hadn't seen anything like it before, OK? No Alphonse Mucha calendars, no Beardsley-by-reflex illustrations in those days) and the contents invariably disappointing. Except when they weren't, but in this case they were.

OTOH it must be said that when the Boomers did retro, it was pre-Raphaelite, which puts us way ahead of people whose retro was the 1930's, 1950's, 1970's, or (dear god) 1980's. My generation was blessed far beyond its deserts.

3. E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros, 1922

Beautiful book. Bought it at 17 in Boston along with Stormbringer, a dizzying find. (TO bookstores still carried only British books so no Ace fantasy series.) I read one of those books in a night and loved it. Guess which.

4. H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, 1928

For those of us who read MR James at a tender age and suffered hysterics thereafter, Lovecraft's unspeakable rites and abominable whatevers (anybody's UR&AW actually) are a source of mirth. The really unspeakable and abominable stuff doesn't need that kind of overinflated adjective, when 'hopping' will do twelve times better. Aaaaghhh- 'hopping'! (mewls in terror.)

5. Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan, 1946

I was kind of emmm about this until Steerpike showed up. Then I fell into the book and emerged a few days later feeling vile. Still think Titus is a twit (authorial insert of the Poor Gifted Misunderstood Me variety) and Steerpike badly done by, cause I! Am! Canadian! and a socialist at heart. Peake OTOH was one of those puzzling Brits who really does seem to think the aristocracy is cool simply by virtue of being aristocratic.

6. Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian, 1950

I've read one Conan story in a collection somewhere. Seem to recall he calls the queen 'lass', my first encounter with the enduring American male notion that ignoring social conventions is admirable manly independence, not disgusting boorish ignorance.

7. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 1950s

For the completist in me. I found it- and the LotR appendices for that matter- daunting, in the sense of a mass of information not easily digested, and haunting, in the sense of a strange, impossibly distant, impossibly ancient and imperfectly apprehended history. 'So long ago it would make you dizzy' as the Japanese say. We don't have that in RL. Go back 12,000 years and we were in caves.

8. C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe, 1950

Well of course Lewis, though the first was never a favourite. For once, a kid's book I actually read when I was a kid.

9. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 1954

Well of course Tolkien. My first experience of a complete and detailed other world. Exhilarating.

10. T.H. White, The Once & Future King, 1958

Love it. Intensely readable, which puts it above any other Arthurian work including but not confined to the Morte d'Arthur and the French romances. But its section on fairies also gave me some of that itchy sense the LotR appendices did- a feeling that there was a vast body of history and literature behind the passages, of which I knew nothing. In the case of TOaFK the feeling was true.

11. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time, 1962

Yes, and well enough but. The Christian aspect of Lewis never bothered me that much- it was smack dab obvious to a convent educated Catholic and never influenced the author's values, if you understand me- the Redemption was a simple fact of history where I came from so of course Aslan dies and rises again, why not? (The dogmatic problem of the Calormenes' god and The Last Battle bothered me a lot more.) But L'Engle's covert Christianity got up my nose, even more in successive books. The good so good and the bad so bad: it's all Last Battle under its skin.

12. Michael Moorcock, Stormbringer 1965

Probably not as good now as then, as I say, but then it was another dizzyingly Long Ago and Far Away and Completely Different world. Loved it.

13. Lloyd Alexander, The Black Cauldron, 1965

I'm in a minority in not liking Alexander that much. I think there are better things you can do with Welsh mythology, like throwing it into your story undigested and unexplained as Garner did in The Weirdstone and The Moon of Gomrath. And the last book operated on the principle that killing half your cast in a couple of chapters makes for a satisfying dramatic ending.

14. Alan Garner, Elidor, 1965

I appreciate it now, but then what I wanted was more Weirdstone stuff and I didn't get it. At least it's not Red Shift.

15. Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968

See other list. It did have the most respectable dragons until Spirited Away.

16. Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn, 1968

Never read or never finished, can't remember which. Don't know why but I think the word 'whimsy' comes in somewhere.

17. Fritz Leiber, Ill Met in Lankhmar, 1970

A favourite, along with Moorcock. The more so because Leiber struck me then as the better stylist while Moorcock does go High Style Bloated on occasion.

18. Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber, 1970

A rattling good read for the young. Rereading now... well, Corwin is such an Admirable American Male one does want to smack some sense and manners into him.

19. Richard Adams, Watership Down, 1972

Nope, never read.

20. Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising, 1973

And if L'Engle's values make me scream, you should see what Cooper's do to me. Many many years later comes the suggestion that maybe she intended us to read the Light as a bunch of idiots always screwing up because they ignored the human aspect of humanity so completely. But that's not how it looked to me in 1973.

21. William Goldman, The Princess Bride, 1973

Mh-hm. But only after the movie made half this book a bedrock part of popular American culture.

22. Patricia McKillip, The Riddle-Master of Hed, 1976

Ohh yes. Though The Forgotten Beasts of Eld was the real eye-opener. But the Riddle-Master not only has one of my favourite undefined erotic tropes in it, back in '76 there was no sequel. We end with black betrayal and no explanations, and I assure you the next eighteen months were hell because of that.

23. Anne McCaffrey, Dragonsong, 1976
24. Terry Brooks, The Sword of Shannara, 1977
25. Steven Donaldson, The (First) Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, 1977

No, thank god x 3.

26. Piers Anthony, A Spell for Chameleon, 1977

Read it, remember nothing. Pleasant and forgettable.

27. Walter Wangerin, The Book of the Dun Cow, 1978

Nope. Forget why not because the reviews raved when it came out and I know I had a copy. In hardback even.

28. Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun, 1980
29. John Crowley, Little, Big, 1981
30. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon, 1982

Dealt with these on the other list. If you have Bradley on the list you really should make it Darkover, because I still recall that with fondness even though I've come to consider MZB a self-important twit. Good books written by unlikable people is a problem of mine so I'm glad I knew nothing about her back in the day.

31. David Eddings, The Belgariad, 1982

He reads pleasantly enough for the first few volumes. Then, as

kickinpants said, you realize that it's same old same old forever after.

32. Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic, 1983

Just not my man.

33. Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood, 1984

No, but should.

34. Margarert Weis & Tracy Hickman, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, 1984

No, for which I'm also glad. Weis and Hickman, like only too many fantasy writers, have no style to speak of. Pedestrian plod in need of some inspiration and an editor.

35. Orson Scott Card, Seventh Son, 1987

I've read *a* Card but this wasn't it.

36. Ellen Kushner, Swordspoint, 1987

Yes, and still don't see what the fuss is about.

37. Mercedes Lackey, The Last Herald-Mage, 1990

For my sins. I was in Japan and English reading material was in short supply. I do recall that at the time I disagreed with the friend who said Vanyel was a wailing wimp. I must have been on drugs.

38. Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana, 1990

Yes, and will never read another Kay because of it.

39. Tad Williams, Stone of Farewell, 1990
40. Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World, 1990

Know neither of these, but I hear no good of Robert Jordan.

41. Stephen King, The Waste Lands, 1991
42. Neil Gaiman, The Season of Mists, 1991

Neither of these is my man.

43. C.S. Friedman, Black Sun Rising, 1991

I'm afraid to read it in case the style turns out to be as utterly uninspired as, oh, Hobb's and Flewellen's and Lackey's and Patton's and...

44. Tim Powers, Last Call, 1992

Who?

45. Philip Pullman, Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, 1995

Can NOT read the man. Two chapters in and I already disliked him intensely, for no reason I could put my finger on. I do not love thee, Dr. Fell, pure and simple.

46. George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones, 1996

Yeah, and I hear no good of Martin either.

47. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone, 1997

Really, truly, I read the first three books for work. And the rest of them because everyone else was. I am a sad sad sheep.

48. Sean Stewart, Mockingbird, 1998

Mock- yeah! Ing- yeah! Bird- yea-- uhh no, I haven't.

49. China Mieville, Perdido Street Station, 2000

We're now into the decade when I read no English at all without I had a *very* good reason, like 'everyone else is' and there were never enough good reasons to read Mieville.

50. Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, 2004

Or, you know, 'the author writes like Dickens and Thackery only female and weird.' Yes, I'll read Clarke for her style alone; also the megrimish stuff that lurks out the corner of my eye when I read her. Truly, in my mind there's a certain kind of genteel horror (in the culture, not the literature) that didn't start until the 19th century, born probably from the rotting corpse of Romanticism, but that grows and grows like one of those black smoke-shapes in Ima Ichiko until it swallows the whole of the 1830s. Clarke knows it's there and that's why her fairies give me the fantods. You couldn't do that brand of fantoddy unhuman and chilling in an 18th century setting, or not so chillingly, because the 18th century was actually closer to the savage irrationality of Clarke's fairydom than the civilized 19th. (In the 17th century I'm convinced there *was* no difference: humans and youkai lived at peace because both were bloody and mad.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The Worm Ouroboros is my Book of Gold, and so few people have read it (let alone the Zimamvia novels). I came to Tolkien's work later, and loved it, but I never imprinted on Tolkien the way I did on Eddison. It doesn't mean I agree with all of his viewpoints, some of which really stick in my craw, but something about his writing just transports me and always has. I can still quote Prezmyra's last speech by heart.

A lot of people really like Tim Powers, although I respect, more than really like, his work. You might try The Stress of Her Regard or Anubis Gate, though I've also heard really good things about Last Call, which I've never gotten around to reading.

I would strongly recommend the Martin, though I don't know how closely your tastes mesh with mine. If you're into backstabbing Realpolitik and casts of trillions, you'll love it.

Not only that, but Martin's current series include dragons. Though not enough for me to plow thru 1000s of pages for it.

It's the 1000s of pages part that off-puts, plus the howls of various fans, plus the backstabbing Realpolitik, plus... I do not trust any western writer to do dragons I want to read. Granted, that's in large part because western dragons are traditionally The Enemy, but still. More or less benign water creatures who write poetry are much more interesting.

Martin dragons are not benign-ish water creatures who write poetry, nor are they benign telepathic companions who will provide you with near-instant transportation and a scaly shoulder to cry on. They are vicious little bastards who will singe your fingers off as baby dragonlets.

Martin is pretty good, but I find this big opus he's working on as very stressful (partly due to all the backstabbing, etc), and made the decision partway through vol.2 to stop and go back when he finishes. Reading such horrible things happening to various characters is almost unbearable when I don't know that the last book is on the table somewhere.

The dragon part is neat, mostly because it adds a whole new layer of power and politic to the world. One thing that Martin is good at is developing characters on different sides. So even though you know this horrible war (with dragons) is coming, there are people on both sides that you root for (which also adds to the stress...)

Since book 4 is just out, and he now says that it will be 7 books (where it was originally going to be 3 or 4...), I don't think I will be reading these until somewhere like...2010...2012...

On the whole it sounds like something I can do without very well. Betrayal, battles, homicide and Dragons The Enemy Of Mankind. And I'm willing to bet, no editor in sight to tighten up the prose and reduce the 450 page thumper to a fast-moving 300 pages. Tell me in 2012 or whenever how it reads and maybe, if I'm still sighted then, I'll have a crack at it. Though what I want to be in 201 is reading Chinese, and I know I won't be.

I'd say that in this case it's not Writers' Bloat, it's trying to pack every last detail in. Which creates bloat, just not...wasteful bloat.

But there is an awful lot to keep track of.

Watership Down is surprisingly good world-within-ours building, complete with a whole mythology of its own that resonates (the myths of prey animals are never very kind...). Tim Powers is worthwhile although something indefinable about him gives me a violent headache. From what little I know of your tastes, you would hate Perdido Street Station immensely.

Watership Down recommendation heartily seconded, although I'd avoid the rather twee sequel story collection. That book got me through southern England, half of the Netherlands and a sizable chunk of Switzerland when I was seven. (I know that's like saying it got me through a road trip in Rhode Island, but we were taking our sweet time.)

Tim Powers begins to sound like medicine. Good for you but not something you'd want to take. I distrust a book that everyone praises but nobody loves. Even cerebral readers can have passionate enthusiasms but when there's no passionate enthusiasm evinced at all, I start to wonder.

I know Watership Down is good, it just doesn't sound like my cuppa. And from what little I know of Perdido Street Station, I think I'd hate it immensely too.

WD is actually my fave book of all time. Adams does a great job of creating characters with their own rules and mythology. Even though it's like...Heroic Epic With Rabbits, it's still well done. The cartoon that came out in the early 80's (or late 70's?) was actually a pretty good retelling of it. Some things were changed, and way less in-depth than the story, but still, did a solid job of telling it. Every time I heard John Hurt afterwards, I would always think "Hazel?????"

Yes, I remember your WD fanfic. Quite moving even for someone who'd never read the book.

I actually gave Terry Brooks a try. He was all over the public library (along with Eddings, who was fun for his first series). I figured that the Sword of Shannara was a test of Brooks' abilities, and maybe his other books would have more originality. It took three other novels to fully accept that Brooks was only playing on what he knew would sell. It's been hard to dive back into fantasy after that. Many authors keep writing for the DnD crowd. Dragonlance-type books would be fine if I wanted stock role-play characters.

Anyway, I'm glad to have stumbled onto your meme. Although I don't agree with all of it, some of those books are going on my to-read list!

Many authors keep writing for the DnD crowd.

That, dammit, is my problem with so much fantasy these days. It's all retread More Of Same. I've been there, I've done that, and it never did much for me in the first place. There really doesn't need to be more than one Tolkien- and anyway, I can read Tolkien for the linguistics and the stylistic pastiche if I'm tired of wizards and warriors. Tolkien clones don't do any of the things that give Tolkien depth and umm gravitas. Like, y'know, landscape. They just write a RPG up as a novel. If I wanted that I could just roleplay. Far more satisfying.

Mystery writers at least do variations; why can't fantasy writers? 'And now for something completely different'

I hate staring at packed sf/fantasy shelves and thinking "There is nothing to read."

And a *fat* nothing to read at that. Nothing makes my spirit sink within me like the sight of a 550 page fantasy novel, unless it's a 450 page fantasy novel first of trilogy. Word processing programs are the death of style, I swear. When you type onto a typewriter there's an automatic mental editor that picks details out for you and provides you with telling phrases and gives you whole passages- because you can't afford not to have it. Once all errors are erasable that editor quits. Then words multiply like breeding fruit flies and terminal bloat sets in. Oh, and of course editors no longer edit. Disaster.

I would happily trade five Fat Fantasy trilogy omnibus novels for one slim volume of Charles Burnet Swann. (Name may be adding or missing a letter.)

They don't write 'em like that any more.

He wrote a gorgeous, elegaic, mythic zinger of a book about David and Jonathan, BTW, How are the Mighty Fallen, much of it from the POV of Jonathan's Siren mother.

That, and I wonder if novel writers these days write bloated because they never had the discipline of writing for magazines. If you don't need to send out short stories to twenty different magazines to pay the rent each month, there's no incentive to learn how to write concisely to begin with.

And, as you pointed out, there's a considerable difference between banging out words on a manual typewriter with a carriage return, or even on an electric typewriter, and keyboarding on a word processor with backups and automatic edits. Having to keep an eye on the number of sheets and whiteout you're consuming makes you a bit more chary of what you write in the first place.

Phillip Pullman is an intensely dislikable man. (You really don't want to know some of the things I've read about him saying in interviews.) He's an utter prat, and that's all there is to it.

Book of the Dun Cow? Lives in 'Christian Fiction' at our store, not 'SciFi/Fantasy', which should tell you all you need to know.

I've heard distant echoes from the Pullman wars. He hates Lewis, yes? There may be reasons for disliking Lewis' religious attitudes but Pullman seems to dislike him for the wrong reasons. And his writing just doesn't give me a sense of a very nice person behind the WP.

Ah yes- that's an essential bit of info on Dun Cow, Thanks.

I've been walking to and fro in front of some of these books in the library. Now I know to reach out for The Once and Future King the next time I go there. I forced myself to read The Mists of Avalon because some really classy Lit. person whom I dislike praised it. (Yes, I am M like that.) I should have known. Okay, but overly long, and in my cluttered room, much more valuable as paperweight rather than for its contents.

I finished Le Guin's Earthsea (Trilogy + 2 later books + Short stories) a few days ago. She is an anthropologist, they say ^^ Also, I think a lot of bunnies, worms, horses and even goats (ppl born in 1975 or later) out there are still intrigued by The Left Hand of Darkness. I've gone through the spoilers in Wiki and elsewhere, and I still want to read it.

And one can escape the label 'sheep' by not reading Harry Potter? That makes me happy, again =P (I've never read anything by Tolkien except The Hobbit, either)

O&FK is long too, and you may find the first book on the kiddy side, since it's more than a little a kid's book. But readable certainly, and the conceit involving Merlin is still one of my favourites.

Bunnies, worms, horses and goats- right. So as I say so often to my little charges, I really am a cow. LHoD is certainly worth reading, though I believe she did a rework on the pronouns in later stories set in the same universe. It's still an early 70's work bound by unthinking early 70's notions. At least Le Guin thought about them afterwards.

Not reading HP isn't an automatic guarantee of 100% non-wooliness, you know, just as reading HP doesn't automatically make you a baa-lamb. Reading HP because everyone else does- like me- is what does it. (Have I mentioned what happened when I bought Half-Blood Prince? I held out until 11 am that Saturday then trudged over to the local indy bookstore. 'All we like sheep,' I said sourly to the counter clerk, 'do you have the new Harry Potter?' He reached behind him for a copy: 'He's baa-aa-aack.')

I'm in HP for the fandom these days. I got HPB at a midnight sale because I wanted to be able to read the lj reactions as soon as possible. And, yes, because I wanted to read the book.

LOL!!! I love your bookstore counter clerk!

I read HP. It's a good way to waste an afternoon. I suspect I would never have gotten in to it, except my sister gave the first volume to PT when it first came out. PT was at the stage of 'I hate reading, it's hard and boring' and after owning it for over a year struggled thru the first chapter and said 'that's not a very good story'. So I read the first 5 chapters to her at bedtime to get her started. So, baaaaaa! and I hope there's an editor for the next volume.

Yeah, they're pretty cool at the local indy.

I think there was an editor for HBP. I remember it as a much faster easier read than OotP which was sheer nail-pulling bloated pain for half its length. My impression is that people who thought HBP a terrible book did so because of the pairing aspects and the fact that Harry ended up with the wrong girl. Possibly Rowling simply doesn't do adolescence that well.

OotP felt like a strong novella struggling to get out of mediocre bloat. There are some very strong moments throughout, but the overall effect is of a mired-down monster truck spinning its wheels to no effect.

HBP was half "Ooh neat!" and half "Ack, dreadful." But I suspect I read HP for different reasons than the target market.

Your list is a nice list, it's gotta good mix with some I've never heard of let alone read before..so i'll spam you some if I may.

You're safe. I spammed myself with your list! Heheh!

Not my list originally so you're welcome to it. I don't know whose it is, actually: it took some serious flipping through friends of friends of friends' lists to get it intact.

The thing you /should/ be at 4:30 am is asleep. Don't tell me your little guy is still waking up at night?

No I had a touch of cold last night so took myself off tobed early..hence I woke up and was looking for something to send me back to sleep with. Your list was perfect. ^__^

Darian woke a little later though for milk. SO I gave him some and we had a little cuddle so it was actually a nice early morning jaunt. As it were.

This is a good list. I'll have to check out some of this at the library. Some of them I've never heard of.

It's been too long since I read Wrinkel in Time. Was their Christian stuff in that?

Tad Williams writes a lot of those Big Long Series, but not at Big Long as Jorden. His first was just a Big Long three books and then later he had a Big Long four book sci-fi series and now it looks like he's back in the Big Long three. He wrote this Epic Animal fantasy called Tailchaser's Song (about cats) and coathored this nice liitle book with someone that dealt with a group of nomadic travelers who were followed by a vampire, and they had to spend their nights telling stories or else the vampire would come over and kill them. It turned out to be a sweet, sad little book. I have yet to finish his long series though.

The Last Unicorn was also pretty good. I don't remember it being that whimsical because the subject matter was pretty dark (for a young adult fantasy.) The cartoon version is also a good watch although the songs that Mia Farrow and Jeff Bridges sings are pretty bad. >_< The movie itself though tells the story pretty well though.

In fact Wrinkle was pretty free of the in-your-face Christianity though I knew it was lurking in the background. Religious upbringings give you a second sense for that.

I know Williams does Long Series, because several authors I look for are in the W section of the bookstore (Wells, Wyllie, Wolfe) and all I ever see is mountains of Williams and Weiss&Hickman.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

50 Fantasy Books Meme

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Its 4:30 am and I'm bored! ^__^

Re: Its 4:30 am and I'm bored! ^__^

Re: Its 4:30 am and I'm bored! ^__^

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