The Runelords by David Farland

I’ve really been trying to step up my reading. And hey, two books in a month, next I know it’ll be three! Also, I’ve been busy lately with a new project, which I’ll talk about another time, so this is going to be a fairly simple review.

Premise:(From the back of the book)
The very Earth is in pain. Its wounds must be healed. There must arise a new king: the Earth King must be reborn. Only then will humanity have a chance to survive.

The Runelords takes you for a fun. ride It offers a few things that most fantasies don’t–as far as I’ve read anyway. It has a very medival culture feel to it, but is not set in the landscape of Europe as we know it. So Farland definitely did his research for this one, and some creative work to boot. Tossed into this culture is a new concept, that of the Runelords themselves. These kings use a magical process using runes and branding (I love Scandinavian mythology so it’s almost automatic for me to like this idea) to take the best qualities donated from their loving or purchased from broke subjects theoretically to rule better but we know better than that, someone will twist this benign practice and we will get a story. 

In the runelords, old traditions have changed over time and when a war unlike anything these people have ever seen marches into Rofehaven the only answer is to go back to the old ways, to follow the Earth King for this war is much more than it seems.

3 Things I liked:
• An existing prophecy doesn’t happen the way it is supposed to–now the men don’t have their guide, their script to play out. Kind of refreshing. It makes you feel like the characters don’t know what they are doing they are shooting in the dark just like real people.
• Characters fail, and fail hard and then they feel the guilt for it and have to find other answers. They see that they could have done a million things differently but they didn’t and have to cope with that and go on with life.
• They beautiful princess loses all her physical beauty, the common peasant girl becomes beautiful. It’s interesting to see how this affects them.

3 Things I didn’t like:
• The endowments sound too much like stats in role playing games. Quantifying one’s strength, speed and brains as concretely as Farland does here seems so unnatural to me.
• If I could give David Farland one piece of advice about improving the writing of this book it would be R.U.E. Resist the Urge to Explain. Some explanations are necessary for world building and catching up on previous events, but he does a great job of showing many actions and conclusions but then clutters the pages with loads of telling.
• Sloppy proofreading–I could nitpick little things extensively. This bothers me the most, for two reasons. For the last ten years or so I’ve trained myself to pick up on continuity errors in my own writing and in workshops, and I know that as an unpublished writer, one mistake like that could get my entire manuscript rejected but it’s fine for him (or his editor?) to mar his work with imperfections because he’s a big name author. Second, letting those little things through feels like taking a sharpie and squiggling lines on, say a da Vinci painting or some other masterwork. Does he have no pride in his work?

anyway, I’ll get to reading the three remaining volumes of this series but I think I’ll let this review stand for them all. Like I said, I’m a bit busy working on a new project. More coming on that soon.

Currently Reading
Fantasy: Spellwright – Blake Charlton
Scholarly: Wizardry & Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy – Michael Moorcock
Writing:(I’m slacking here)

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John Crowley-Little, Big

I have to preface this entry by saying I’m a little biased about this book. I’ve heard so many wonderful things about it: It’s so awesome, Oh my god you have to read it, If you want to start reading fantasy start with this one, this book is so great and so on. So I dove into the pages with high expectations. I thought, if they think it’s so great, I should also think it is so great.

I should have known better. What others like is not what I like. I know I like high fantasy and epic fantasy. I like other world fantasy, including futuristic. Urban and Contemporary rarely does it for me, though rural can work sometimes. I like clever and witty narrative and dialog.

I should have quizzed these people more on what they like before I thought I’d like this monumental work of fantasy literature. But I can respect Crowley for what he did in this book.

Going into it blind, I thought it would be about a peculiar family and the house or estate they live on. But in the end, not so much. It’s about what is done to them. So the whole book is getting us familiar with their tale, with them. Making us get attached to them and feeling for them when the standard bumps of life show up in their lives. This book is about 500 pages long, and covers about five generations. Every time he jumped into a new one I got bored and agitated with it. So there were many people to whom I was supposed to empathize and develop a relationship with.

Meanwhile there are hints dropped and heavy handed (I think) foreshadowing–I actually rolled my eyes at the most prominent instance. To be blunt, it’s dodging of the fantastic annoyed me. The questioning and uncertainty irked me. And the two most main characters never even entertained the possibility. That certainly adds tension, but one makes me feel left out and two makes me want to be in someone else’s head more. There are a few brief respites though, like Crowley wanted to give us some glue or something.

The thing I disliked the most was dialog. They spoke in a halting and staggered fashion. A word, a descriptive phrase, then the rest of the sentence. People do not speak like that. Sometimes they might, but not ALL THE TIME. So he was trying to pass these people off as eccentric, sure, but I think my blood pressure went up when certain characters were speaking.

But none of that really matters in the big picture. Roz Kaveney said in a review she wrote in 1982 for “Books and Bookmen” that this is one of the few stories that reconcile humans and fairy, which it does. And I couldn’t put my finger on why I didn’t like it until I read that. The characters in this book seemed so askew for “normal” people. They’d have to be to do that job. So they didn’t appeal to me on the front of normal people exposed to fairy, or occupants of a fairy land who happened to be in our world. To me they were awkward, with a very exclusive feel, but not pretentious (otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered).

So hearing Ms. Kaveney’s conclusion, and having read “From Homer to Harry Potter,” I can easily classify this story as literature of fairy. This fantasy pulls very strongly from traditional “this world” beliefs and doesn’t take it to another world. I’ve always held stories that deal with actual Faerie slightly apart from the other fantasy I read. Usually when I refer to fantasy, I’m thinking of epic or high, or even some urban and contemporary if the fantastical elements are strong enough.

So, maybe I read it wrong, or just missed something. I don’t feel the need to read the rest of Crowley’s work to see what is particular about this book or just him. But as I’ve said above, much of this story didn’t grab me.

Okay, so what did I like about this book? Why did I read all of it? There are a few reasons. I’m a little obsessive about finishing what I start. It’s a highly influential work. I hoped it would get better. And after I got about a quarter into it and didn’t like it, I wanted to at least be able to say why honestly.

On another note… hopefully I’ll have another story out for sub soon.

Currently Reading
Fantasy: The Runelords – David Farland
Scholarly: Wizardry & Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy – Michael Moorcock
Writing:(I’m slacking here)

Submissions out
Flash: 0
Short: 0
Agent: 0

I’ve just completed Patrick Ford’s The Mabinogi, a translation of medieval Welsh folk tales and mythological cycle. Reading this book lets me tick off one more on my list of reading to catch up on non-Greek mythology. I can say, with some embarrassment, that I have never heard of any element of these stories before, so when someone in my office glanced at the title of the book I was reading and commented, “obscure Welsh literature, great,” I felt a little absolved.

When I was just getting into the book, I was a little disappointed in the story telling. The story arcs rambled, and changed seemingly without explanation. Story lines ranged far beyond the interest point. And the laundry lists of heraldic titles and accomplishments; tasks and quests made for really dull reading. There was practically NO SHOWING. But that is what was recorded in the original manuscripts, which were written down by someone who heard someone else tell the oral story. Would the people back then simply “understand” all the tactile imagery that was possible when the characters go riding across the land? Had they done it all themselves, in an uneventful journey? The author of this book could only decipher what his modern day learnings let him to reach back and translate the Mabinogi.

The author, Patrick K. Ford is the Margaret Brooks Robinson Research Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Needless to say he wrote this book with academic interests and not story telling in mind. Despite being very sparse, with little imagery and barely three dimensional characters the stories serve to give us 21st century denizens a peek into the ways of old cultures. However I can see how each of these 6 – 40 page stories could be turned into a rich novel, however dark.

These tales aren’t for the weak-of-stomach. From crushing skulls barehanded, stealing, rape, murder, torture to animal cruelty they show the worst of human nature. They show what people do to get what they want: woman, money, power, land, respect, honor and revenge. And sometimes people do terrible things to breach hindrances.

My favorite story was that of “Manawydan son of Llŷr.” Even though this story is rangy, and the events a little jerky we see magic, trouble, rescue, punishment by social decree and then the wrongs are righted. I just love happy endings; well I like it more when the jerks who were wrong get what’s coming. Mainly I like the story line where a group of people are displaced from their own land and must wander to find a new place, yet no matter how hard they work, they cannot find a place they fit in. And after some time they return home and break their curse. I like this because they didn’t give up. They didn’t sit idly waiting to find a way. Even when they weren’t trying to break the curse, they were working hard, trying to get by because they had to.

That’s it for now. Maybe someday I’ll come back to these tales for story fodder, or for further study.

Currently Reading:
Fantasy: Little, Big – John Crowley
Scholarly: Wizardry & Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy – Michael Moorcock
Writing:(I’m slacking here)

Submissions out:
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Agent: 0

Even though I haven’t posted here, in my reading/writing blog for some time, I’m sticking to it. I’m coming back and journaling my most recently finished book, which I’ve had finished for a few weeks, but have not had the time to blog it.

Glen Cook
The Chronicles of the Black Company
Omnibus of the first three books in the Black Company series

I read this book in a strange circumstance. I read the second omnibus (last three books) before this one. So I already knew the characters, and what would happen to them in the future. Cook so dutifully referenced and explained many of the events of the first book in the second, I could say to myself, “ah yes, I remember this,” as I came across new scenes. This is a rather disappointing way to read a book. So I’m chalking up my less-than-thrilled reaction to that.

While not making for good reading, reading out of order made for good studying. I could see how he dips back to describe old events in the here-and-now later on–the amount of detail and action he needed to evoke the memory but not to go off on too much of a tangent.

Reading out of order also presented another odd reaction in me. I liked the characters more, and quicker upon starting the second book than the first. I also thought they were more fully introduced and described going into the second than the first. I would have thought this would be the other way around. But again, I got a lesson from this. Cook had probably gotten more into the characters’ heads after three books, and better knew how to introduce them later on. And also, he didn’t stop popping in insights and descriptions of them no matter how far into the story he got.

Another theory on my more intense character attachment later in the series is that they started different, more important roles in the beginning of the second book. One thing Cook is known for is telling stories from the point of view of the common man instead of kings, princes and heroes. In the first book, the characters are all no-ones in a mercenary outfit, however they are doing important things. Yet by the second book, they all of a sudden take on new, more important roles. I don’t want to put in spoilers here, so I won’t be specific. I’d almost argue that they aren’t “the common man” anymore. Yes they still have their roots in peasantdom, but they have considerable power over others via reputation, which draws them up in society. This seems just a little contrary to the “common man” motif Cook is known for.

So after reading the middle through the end, and then the beginning to the middle, I felt a little let down by the end of the first book. This was a major turning point in the series, and their world too. There was build up, and foreshadowing tension and suspense throughout the book, and I knew what was coming. But what I was interested in was how it would happen. And, I’ll say again, it didn’t seem like much. I think he could have written it “bigger.” What it boils down to is two, or three people fighting, be they gods or beggars, it still kinda looks the same. When you watch, or read about, an even match, it doesn’t look like much. What makes it impactful is the sense of importance the author imbues in it, which is directly related to the buildup of suspense/tension. What will happen if the good guys win? The bad? What are the implications? We knew what these were, but didn’t really see, at the end of the book, what the fallout was.

Recalling the beginning of the second book, that is where the fallout occurred. Cook structured his books, his six book series, to keep the readers buying. But for me, who read them out of order, it just made it fell flat.

Currently Reading:
Fantasy: Little, Big – John Crowley
Scholarly: The Mabinogi – Patrick K. Ford
Writing:(I’m slacking here)

Submissions out:
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