Unfortunately, I thought it was kind of mediocre. It had elements I enjoyed, but the fantastical bits felt simultaneously too derivative to be surprising and too unmoored from actual folklore to seem referential. It felt like neither fish nor fowl. (Also: King writing as a modern teenager in first person makes my teeth hurt.)
Yeah, I didn't think it was great (and poorly edited in the last quarter). Kind of just wanted to make sure it wasn't me. It's kind of like Fairy Tales are real and live in the Upside Down. It took me longer to read than I would imagine it would take me to read Jonathan Strange. I think we have a copy of that on the shelf. The wife didn't like it. I never bothered. Maybe I'll take it with me to the mountains the end of the month.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is kind of an odd duck, but I’ve also never quite read anything like it. Susanna Clarke hasn’t just thought up a story, she’s invented an entire magical history of England, with mythology and reference books and scholarly citations and rambling footnotes that sometimes end up being entire short stories in and of themselves. It’s an incredibly rich work of imagination and I think of it a lot even a decade later. It’s a book that feels like a TARDIS.
This is something I've wanted to read for a long time. Love dense, almost overwrought shit like this. Should maybe bump it up the list.
I have read that one (or listened on audiobook) and loved. That one came out at the perfect time.
It’s a slow book and it’s written in a sort of Austenian pastiche, but if you can wrap your head around that it just feels like she’s crafted this world that spills beyond the borders of the novel.
store.moveon.org
Thanks for posting this. I’ve been reading this a poem or two a day. Just read “spoon” which is beautiful and devestating.
Ugh, so good.
I'm through book 6 so far and I like it quite a bit!
Loved the series. 9 books in all plus several novellas that fit in between. The tv series only went up to the end of book 6 I think.
I've read them all but the last 2. They're a lot of fun. Not particularly challenging, but good entertainment. Worth it if you're a sci-fi fan.
Yep! There was (is?) a humble bundle of all the books and a couple side novels for $18 so I went for it. I’m feeling a series void after finishing Wolfe’s Solar Cycle. We’ll see how far I get; despite being a big nerd I have a low tolerance for a lot of genre writing.
I’m only twenty pages into Gardens, but I’m liking it plenty. There’s enough immediacy and story over plot so far; in contrast I read the first third of Priory of the Orange Tree earlier this summer and all it was serving me was backstory and worldbuilding.
edit: the sale is still live for two days for those interested:
Humble Book Bundle: Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen by TOR Publishing Group
We’ve teamed up with TOR for our newest book bundle. Get all 10 volumes of Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson and more. Pay what you want & support Covenant House!www.humblebundle.com
And @ayayrawn only after lightly slamming Priory did I think to cross-reference what other books we have in common
Just an update, I'm stalled out about 40% into Gardens. A lot of reviews claim the book is confusing or dense, but the operative word I'd use is obfuscated. There's clearly a world, and some larger conflict, but what the individual characters, or even their larger factions, are doing remains vague. I put it down after a couple weeks, and in picking it up again I wasn't lost but I couldn't recall the significance of anything/anyone.
