The Once and Future King by T.H. White
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Ugh. It pains me to mark one of the literary classics two stars, but I also have to admit to myself that I started reading this book in January and now it’s September and I haven’t finished it and really have no intention of ever actually getting around to doing so.
There are 639 pages in my book. I made it only 245 pages into it. It felt like much much more. (The typeface is tiny, I swear!) I stopped partway through “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” but did make it all the way through “The Sword in the Stone.”
Let’s just assess real quick: the cover of my book includes a quote from none other than Ursula K. LeGuin about how much she loves it. The subtitle of the book is “The World’s Greatest Fantasy Classic.” With that in mind, imagine my shock when I discovered the slapstick-heavy Disney movie The Sword in the Stone is actually completely accurate to the book.
This book–or at least the parts I managed to get through–is just ridiculously silly! It’s also very dense. And randomly episodic. And I just couldn’t bring myself to care about King Arthur among all the nonsense. I still feel that I really ought to just buckle down and finish the damn book so I can say I did, but then I’d be sucking 80% of the joy of reading right out of my life and I still wouldn’t finish it until at least next June.
So, adieu Merlin. Maybe some other time.
