always more room for... books
Feb. 12th, 2004 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerSomeone asked Neil Gaiman for recommendations of classic fantasy; he replied, in part:
I remember reading The King of Elfland's Daughter at an early age (I'll see if I can retrieve that from my parents' shelf next time I vist), and I have a Cabell, though not that one. I enjoyed Ernest Bramah (just recommended it to a friend myself recently), both for tis dry humour and the fact that DL Sayers was a fan. White, of course, I read and reread constantly as a kid, and since. Tried Gormenghast a few times and didn't much like it, but perhaps I should give it one more try. Haven't ever read Chesterton, and Mirrlees and Finney are new names to me.
Let's see... I'm not sure what's in print right now, but classic fantasies that shouldn't blend, and should make you happy to have read them would include Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, Lord Dunsany's fantasies, both the short stories in volumes like Time and the Gods, and the longer books like The Charwoman's Shadow and The King of Elfland's Daughter, James Branch Cabell -- The High Place is a good place to start: it's the story of what might have happened if Bluebeard had woken, married, and tired of Sleeping Beauty, or Jurgen, or The Silver Stallion -- and then there are Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung stories, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, and there's always Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Charles G Finney's The Circus of Dr Lao is, I think, back in print at present. T. H. White's Sword in the Stone and his Once and Future King remain marvellous...
I remember reading The King of Elfland's Daughter at an early age (I'll see if I can retrieve that from my parents' shelf next time I vist), and I have a Cabell, though not that one. I enjoyed Ernest Bramah (just recommended it to a friend myself recently), both for tis dry humour and the fact that DL Sayers was a fan. White, of course, I read and reread constantly as a kid, and since. Tried Gormenghast a few times and didn't much like it, but perhaps I should give it one more try. Haven't ever read Chesterton, and Mirrlees and Finney are new names to me.
