I’ve read a few best-selling fantasy series—Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, Twilight, Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, The Dark Is Rising—but I would never describe myself as an aficionado. First because all these books are on about a fourth-grade reading level--
At this point, were this a sitcom like Scrubs, this is where you would hear the sound of the record needle being dragged across the grooves. "Fourth-grade reading level"? Lord of the Rings? Really?
I don't have much to say about the recommendations offered. It's a decent-enough list of recent fantasy writing, but it all tends to the "epic fantasy" arena. The fantasy genre is incredibly rich, offering so much beyond the whole swords-in-epic-lands kind of thing -- Tim Powers, Christopher Moore, Lian Hearn, many others -- so I'm surprised the writer of this article stuck with mainstream, epic fantasy. I haven't read Goodkind or Hobb, but I have read Tad Williams, and Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is a good series, although I found it overlong and overstuffed. Erikson is good, although I wasn't as wowed by Gardens of the Moon as most others (which leads me to believe that I may have missed something there). And it's all a matter of taste, but it's been years since Terry Brooks impressed me.
Anyhoo....
5 comments:
I've often said that fantasy really isn't my thing but I'm coming to realize that's because whenever someone mentions fantasy I think of Lord of the Rings or something else that involves running around in the woods on some highly important quest and having magical adventures. But once in a while I accidentally discover a fantasy that is completely different from what I've always thought of as fantasy. What you might call my first clue was when I started reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville thinking it was science fiction and then a couple of chapters into it suddenly realizing that "Hey! This is fantasy."
Fantasy is an extremely broad genre. It's still hard to make myself let go of that old notion of what fantasy is though. Now I catch myself saying, "Fantasy really isn't my thing except for..."
Being able to tell the difference between an apparent science fiction and fantasy is impressive, at least from my untrained perspective. They sometimes seem very similar to me.
Fantasy that is true allegory is probably not what the reviewer was referring to.
That made me stabby. First of all, the vast majority of the books mentioned in that first paragraph are books written for children or teens--therefore, it's to be expected that their reading level wouldn't be "adult." Also, I'm not sure that's a valid reason to dismiss them. I happen to love YA fiction. The fact that a book is written for a teenager does not mean that it is inherently without worth.
Except Twilight. ;)
Believe me, you could read fantasy and SF for fifty years and still not be certain on where the dividing line is between the two genres. In just about any place where F&SF are discussed, the question of what constitutes SF and what constitutes Fantasy will come up regularly and never get resolved. That's part of what makes it all so much fun to read!
Erin, I'm with you. Many great and enduring works spring from Children's and YA literature. This reviewer's notion -- I wanted to read some fantasy but didn't want to work hard at it -- really rubbed me wrong.
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