I read Mary Stewart’s Thornyhold, published in 1988, therefore near the end of her career. It was competently told and mildly pleasant until the last 30 pages, when she realized the story had to end somehow, and stopped making sense. I’m not sorry I read it, but I’m not tempted to re-read. The most interesting thing was that it was about two witches named Geillis, and uses the phrase “Geillis is a witch’s name” while the characters are touring neolithic stone circles … so now I know what Diana Gabaldon was reading just before she wrote Outlander.
I have never read Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy, so I have ordered a used copy of that. PS heirs of Mary Stewart’s estate: license her damn books for e-book distribution already! Sheesh!
In the meantime I tried to read Newes from the Dead by Mary Hooper, but threw it at the wall about 25% through. I really can’t stand stories about angelic, blameless women being abused by one-dimensional, horrible men. It does a disservice to both sexes. I really, really prefer my female characters to be partially responsible for their problems. That way they’re not just objects to be acted upon, nawmean?
Then I tried to read Sword of Shannara since the MTV series starts in January. Got five or six pages in and gave up. I have a terrible time parsing Brooks’ sentences–as in, so much trouble that it totally throws me out of the reading experience, and I’m too old to put up with that shit. Sorry, Terry.
So I don’t have anything to read until Merlin shows up. Poo.
It’s been 30 mumble mumble years since I read the series. I liked the first VERY much, but the later ones didn’t catch me as much, might have been the romance angles that didn’t appeal to me or just the shifting of focus from Merlin to Arthur.
I read The Sword of Shannara when it first came out. I didn’t have a hard time with Brooks’ sentences (I’ve read far worse), but it was such a transparent ripoff of [The Lord of the Rings that I haven’t read anything by Brooks since.
Speaking if Jane, I’m reading Reginald Hill’s A Cure for All Diseases. Besides being a fun little Dalziel and Pascoe muder mystery, it also wryly ‘finishes’ Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon. You don’t have to know that, or care to enjoy the book, but if you do you’ll notice some entertaining hat tips to Miss Austen. It’s a lightweight book and there are too many characters, but I’m enjoying the heck out of it, anyway.
I am also reading **The Secret Speech **by Tom Robb Smith and enjoying it greatly. Some of it is hard to take (I am at the point of the prison ship takeover by the prisoners) but fascinating.
I do remember the “Cult of Personality” attack by Khrushchev on Stalin and his excesses. Old age is seeing things you remember becoming plots for books or films.
Well, you dodged several hundred pages of bullet there. Because that book is condensed “time you’ll never get back”.
Right now, I’m reading “Wicked”, having picked it up at the local library’s annual book sale. It’s … interesting, but I’m not sure I’m enjoying it yet. I’m about halfway through and Elphaba(sp?) is still a sympathetic if not particularly likable character. But the magical land of Oz is described as if it were a combination of dust-bowl Kansas and Russia under the Tsars. Not particularly magical; just a repressed, drought-stricken dictatorship. It’s been 45+ years since I read the actual series, so I don’t remember if any of the mythology/religion has any basis in the original Oz books, but it’s all very dour.
So I’ll guess I’ll see where the author takes this…