I dropped the Recent Leisure sidebar. Lovely in theory, but I’m two weeks behind updating it. Suffice it to say that I’ve come around to enjoying The Hulk, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle was tons of fun and not very intelligent, and Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry is incredibly mawkish in the light of day. His more recent work holds up nicely, though.
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For all that it’s not as mature as his later works, I still think Fionavar is head and shoulders above most of the “dump people from the Real World into Fantasyville” genre. And it blew the doors off of most of the Giant Series Fantasy I was reading at the time.
Not to mention all the raiding I was able to do for games from it.
I can’t regret loving it.
It is that. And I still tear up when Diarmuid makes his sacrifice. But man…
I read the Sarantine Mosaic side by side with the Fionavar books. It’s an interesting contrast. In the former, mature adults do amazing things and have amazing capacities; in the latter, the spotlight is on college kids with wisdom beyond their years. (With, yeah, some smart grownups as well. But it’s really about the five.)
Possibly I’m getting old; the latter just feels more plausible…
On my last reread, I was struck by the idea that Fionavar was an excellent YA series, but didn’t hold up so much when you were in your 30s or so.
I was less enamored of the Sarantine Mosaic than I was of Lions of Al-Rassan, Song for Arbonne, and Tigana. Don’t know why, though.
Yeah, I bet it’s a better YA series.
Sarantine Mosaic is a little sprawling. Two books, for no clear reason. Song for Arbonne is my favorite but I haven’t reread it in a while.