If you are reading this blog entry that means you are neither reading Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name Of The Wind nor are you reading Peter Brett’s The Warded Man.
Since both of these are two of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time, I am sad for you. You are missing out.
I personally count myself lucky that I’ve got many good friends who were patient enough with my “I don’t read Fantasy” rants and nevertheless compelled me to pick up George R.R. Martin. Because it’s clear, from the rabbit trail I’ve tripped down in the last three months, that Fantasy has undergone a renaissance in the last five years.
When I gave up on Fantasy in the mid 1980s I was turning my back on a dozen cheap knockoffs of Tolkein, released every year with garish covers and that loathsome “Fantasy Font” that makes a book look instantly like it belongs in a garage sale. 
These books almost always rendered the old adage about judging by covers completely moot. You could look at one of these books and know instantly that, like a McDonald’s hamburger, you would get the same warmed over taste you’d had exactly a thousand times before. While I enjoy both McDonalds and a comforting degree of sameness, it was getting really tiresome. I swore I’d never again read a book with the terms “elfling” or “mage”.
Conveniently that was right around when I was getting ready to go to college, and much of my reading was designed to make me as smart as possible for the upcoming classes. I started devouring a lot of biographies (the aforementioned Mozart, various ex-Beatles, ex-Presidents and founding fathers) and classics. It was right about here that I first read through all of Dickens and polished off Les Miserables. I was also majorly into Gone With the Wind and read that once a year–ah, the days before Harry Potter was my Once A Year book.
When college came I read very college-y things. Siddharta and Camus and various Russians. I swear one of the reasons I left college was the tired stoop in my soul’s posture from all the weight of Serious Literature. Not so much the classics, but the newer things, the modern American stuff and the older Russian stuff that conspires to make you want to slit your wrists.
In the past fifteen years I’ve bounced around genres like a pinball, veering in and out of Mystery, Thriller, Romance and whatever you call people like Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Clive Cussler…all those fellas. I’ve also read countless books on the history of Medicine, comparative religion, British and Celtic history etc. But NEVER would I touch fantasy. Ever. Until now. And now I’m telling you the most exciting writers doing the most exciting things have been apprenticing in Fantasy. And the genre is getting remade into the best possible world of The Story.
Are you in all seriousness putting up a book by Lloyd Alexander as an example of something that can be judged (negatively) by its cover? As an example of a bad book that drove you away from reading fantasy? You are dead to me. Dead!
Or, at least, you are dead to my early teen self, and I’m pretty sure that if I were to reread the Prydain books you would be dead to me now. Those were some of my very favorite kids’ fantasy novels: serious but funny, strong female characters (including a girl who gets her own bildungsroman), enough hints about the sources to make a bright preteen look for the Mabinogion, and general good stuff.
I’ll be honest; I’ve never read any Lloyd Alexander xcpt for the Black Cauldron nivelisation. That was just the only cover art example from 1985 I could find on short notice. I KNEW as soon as I put it up somebody would be all “those books are teh awesome!!”
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
OK, I guess I can upgrade your condition to “gravely ill,” then.
I’m actually not sure how well those books hold up to an adult’s eyes. They were very much written for pre-teens. But they were not formulaic garbage. Ya know, I own the whole set. I ought to go back and re-read them; it’s only been decades.
So… you don’t want me to read your blog ?
(scratches head)
(head explodes)
I feel obliged to mention this. The Name of the Wind was phenomenal, but when it came out, Pat R. acted like the series was basically done and just needed to be polished and published. And that’s been several years and he’s been backpedalling like mad. I really, really want this to be a great series. But The Eye of the World was phenomenal and then… My hope fades with each passing month. He may be Martin, but I’m betting he’s Jordan.
S
I’ve got both books on my to be read list. And with your endorsement of them, I have a feeling they may move up.
Fantasy, like a lot of other genres, suffers from the fact that while there are some great nuggets out there, you still have to wade through a lot of less than stellar stuff to get to them.
In fact, it seems like the less than stellar stuff is what sells the most or is most available mass market. It seems like I see a lot of Terry Brooks in stores like Wal-Mart, Target or grocery stores but you don’t see Rothfuss there.
I read most of the Magic Kingdom: For Sale, Sold novels in high school and honestly, they’re all the same story over and over again. If I can realize this at 15, surely others can too…
Amazingly, Brooks has gone back to the well recently and it was….wait for it..pretty much the same story.
And it’s books like that the taint the fantasy genre in my mind.