Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Do I Like Fantasy?

I always thought I did. But in recent years, I've wondered more and more. Not if I like it at all - I do - but if I'm really a fan. I can't decide. Maybe you can. The evidence.
  • As a kid I read Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series at least three times.
  • I've never read the Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit and The Fellowship, and the beginning of The Two Towers, yes. But not any more. Nor do I particularly want to.
  • I read in high school the first two Shannara trilogies, and loved them.
  • In college I tried (twice) to get into The Eye of the World, the first book in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, reading hundreds of pages. Never happened, and I never finished it.
  • I've seen all three Lord of the Rings films multiple times, and love them dearly.
  • I am now reading George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, the first book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. I am loving it, much to my surprise. I expected to not really like it enough to invest time in such a massive series (I only picked it up because news of the HBO series intrigued me), but was rapidly sucked in.
  • I played D&D sporadically in high school and college, but never that regularly.
  • Stephen King is my favorite author.
  • I read comic books (but find explicitly "fantasy" comics boring).
  • I am a fair-to-middling Star Wars nerd, and have read a good dozen or so of the novels.
  • Apart from what I listed above, I don't know that I've ever read any other fantasy novels.

So - what say you?

Until Whenever

3 comments:

R.A. Porter said...

I'd have to say, based on never finishing LotR, that you're not a fan. And I wouldn't feel bad about it. I've read LotR though twice and read a bit of other fantasy when I was young but don't consider myself a fan either.

I like some, I don't like some others.

Tosy And Cosh said...

You know, that's the same litmus test I keep coming back to.

Kelly Sedinger said...

You're not a "fan". But you are someone with some appreciation for the genre and some interest in it. Maybe you become a fan someday, maybe not.

I'm interested to see if GRRM loses you at some point. The general consensus right now seems to be that he's starting to spiral out of control a bit, and after he got the first three books out fairly quickly, there's only been one book in that series over the last nine years.