What other fantasy books do YOU read?

[Alfirin]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

Ditto. I also think that she could really use some better vocabulary. Whenever I think of HP I think of "reckon" - she repeats that word waaay too often. I know she wants to imitate British slang, but it just gets on my nerves. As for the 5th book - I only read the 6th one to find out what Harry's OWL results were. I didn't see any other point in reading on.

Correct choice of words can make or break a book. One of the main reasons I absoulely hated Eric Rücker Eddison's Worm Ouroborous books (which some people regard so hightly they put them and Tolkein on equal fantasy footing, or even say Eddison is infinitely superior). was the language. In an effort to try and make the story as "old time epic" as possible, Edding's chose to usually go with extremely archaic language ("spake' instead of speaks, "crokindrell" instead of "crocodile" etc.) at the beginning this seemed to me okay, but as the book wore on, the choices of language and grammar just became wearying. Olde tyme spelling is fine for a period appropriate piece of literature (Oroborous was written in the 1920's so the "it was the way they talked then" argument doesn't really work here) but after a few hundred pages it get's tiresome. It's rather had to get into a book if you have to have a dictionary next to you and look up every other word. Eddison's work might have been good if it was being read to you, a la a saga or a play (in fact the one thing I came away from the book with was that it would probably make a very good tv series) but read on the printed page, it just got frustrating. I also did not like the end of the story, where the heros discover that not only have all the villians escaped but escaped more or less unharmed (i.e. all thier efforts and sacrafices were basically for nothing) and jump for joy becuse it means they can go through the whole palaver of the book all over again (minus the fairly large number of individuals who died the first time round trying to let the heroes win.). I have no problem dealing with things like odd language, but only when the story is worth it, and in my opinion, in Ourobrous, it isn't
I sort of feel the same way about David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus also often considered a classic. In this case, after having read it through three times, I kept getting the impression that to understand it would require a couple years of modern philisopy, in particular Wittgenstein, and even then you'd have to 100% agree with those philosophers for the book to be meaningful.