The Once & Future Thing.

After years of saying I was going to read The Once and Future King, I gave up and listened to it on Audible. I don’t actually like audiobooks that much (primarily because I can read faster than I can listen) but Audible also offers me free books at least once every 8 months or so, and I CAN listen when commuting to/from work and while at work, which are times when I can’t really pull out a book and stare. I’d never made this book a priority and now that I have, I’m marginally confused by its ranking among “the best” of sci-fi and fantasy. It’s not a bad book at all but it’s too meaty and it’s often excruciatingly difficult to read a man’s comments on women from 1958. (There were so many men in 1958 who didn’t say things like this; I’m certain of this fact and yet all the books that get to be recommended as “the best” seem to be shrouded in men mistakenly talking about how women operate, as if they’re a mystical species completely separate from men.)

That said, TH White also turned Lancelot on his nose (possibly literally, as he’s supposed to be so physically and emotionally ugly) and I like that he’s not the golden noble knight who succumbs temporarily but rather a struggling sadistic self-loathing mess who sins constantly. (Was that good enough alliteration?) But we get a series of women who cluck about like alien beings. I have never understood this because I don’t think women themselves acted like this in most centuries, much as I don’t think most men were misogynistic jerks in the way they get portrayed in media. (I’m not denying the existence of either.) And from this development of women I lose interest in some of Lancelot’s encounters with them. Oh a woman is doomed to be miserable if she has only one child. Oh a woman is doomed to be miserable if Lancelot will not be there to repeatedly have intercourse with her.

Still, though, it’s not a bad book (or rather, short series of books condensed into one extremely long volume) and I’m glad I read it for its reference but I would also not want to reread it or launch into a related set of works. I wasn’t thrilled to read Outlander either, and as such didn’t get into the TV show. Here, I wouldn’t really want to watch a remake of this version of the characters, even as a modern day HBO style saga. (Then again, I also have to point to how I have zero interest in continued watching of Game of Thrones despite having read Ice and Fire.)

 

Iron Pissed

This is just my note to tell you that I have still not been able to figure out what I think about Marvel’s latest Netflix offering: Iron Fist is a mess. It has extremely entertaining moments of messiness but it also has excruciatingly slow and boring-to-watch fights and characters who don’t entirely exist as characters so much as plot devices. But if someone can tell me the deal with this show, I’d love to know.