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The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams
Aug. 8th, 2015 09:57 pmDNF.
I've been thinking I would do one of those things where you read only women and genderqueer writers for a year (details still fuzzy). And I figured before I did that, I'd run through some of the male writers I've had on TBR for years.
Yeeeeeah. That's . . . convincing me that doing without men for a year is a fantastic idea.
I gave this classic epic fantasy four hundred pages. It's – you know the thing where you read so much work that is responding to the earnest, straight-up original that you forget the earnest, straight-up original actually exists? And then you read it and you're like whoa, what the fuck?
This is thousands of pages of epic fantasy about the pubescent kitchen boy in a castle becoming apprenticed to a wizard doctor and getting caught up in the magical fight for a disinherited prince and a kingdom overtaken by evil, and there are scary elves, and prophecies, and magic swords, and he's going to become a man, you guys. Oh yeah, and he has mysterious parentage. And it is all.so.earnest.
And I just. There aren't many women in those four hundred pages I read, not so's you'd notice. But there is a minute, obsessive interest in this pubescent boy, and I just.
I do not want to read thousands of earnest pages tracking the rate of descent of his testicles, you know? Like, there are so many better things I could be doing with my life.
I've been thinking I would do one of those things where you read only women and genderqueer writers for a year (details still fuzzy). And I figured before I did that, I'd run through some of the male writers I've had on TBR for years.
Yeeeeeah. That's . . . convincing me that doing without men for a year is a fantastic idea.
I gave this classic epic fantasy four hundred pages. It's – you know the thing where you read so much work that is responding to the earnest, straight-up original that you forget the earnest, straight-up original actually exists? And then you read it and you're like whoa, what the fuck?
This is thousands of pages of epic fantasy about the pubescent kitchen boy in a castle becoming apprenticed to a wizard doctor and getting caught up in the magical fight for a disinherited prince and a kingdom overtaken by evil, and there are scary elves, and prophecies, and magic swords, and he's going to become a man, you guys. Oh yeah, and he has mysterious parentage. And it is all.so.earnest.
And I just. There aren't many women in those four hundred pages I read, not so's you'd notice. But there is a minute, obsessive interest in this pubescent boy, and I just.
I do not want to read thousands of earnest pages tracking the rate of descent of his testicles, you know? Like, there are so many better things I could be doing with my life.