The Sword in the Stone

[redbird]

cattitude read me T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone, at a chapter or part-chapter at a time, before bed. We finished last night (the very last chapter is short, so he folded it in with the penultimate).

Basically, this is the story of King Arthur's upbringing and education. In this version, he's fostered by Sir Ector, lord of the Forest Sauvage; everyone knows that Ector's son, Kay, will become a knight, and Arthur, called "Wart", won't, but gets basically the same education. There's some discussion, early, of what sort of education to give the boys, and whether the roads are safe enough to send them to Eton--and then Wart goes out and finds Merlin to be their tutor.

Many adventures are had. The story wanders back and forth across time; late in the book the narrative voice says something like "in the fifteenth century, or whenever it was"--horribly late for Arthur, and late for Robin Hood, Marian, and all, who the boys have a fine adventure with and who wander back into the story occasionally. The entire thing is a festival of anachronism: not only are the characters pulled from various points of English legend, but there's no definable tech level, and just about everyone talks like late Victorian or Edwardian English people, down to complaining about the Bolshevists. It's deliberate and effective humor, not the bad anachronism of an author who doesn't realize that the past is a foreign country.

White does a good job with the characters. I particularly like Merlin, Wart, Archimedes, and the Questing Beast, and have been getting fonder of Sir Ector as the story proceeds. On the other hand, I keep interrupting the story to make rude remarks about some of the characters, notably King Pelenor, who should have more sense in a variety of ways.

The book ends at a tournament, held as a combination of festival-for-its-own-sake and to seek the heir of the dead king Uther Pendragon. Kay has just been knighted and Wart is now formally his squire: Kay forgets his sword, sends Wart after it, wacky hijinks ensue, and Wart discovers that he's to be king, a thought that fills him rather with dismay than glee.


Now we need to select a next reading-aloud book: even if we had it, Cattitude informs me that The Once and Future King isn't nearly as good.

(I'd thought of going back and editing my previous post, but disabling comments means I can't get to the "edit post" page.)

Edited to add: Thanks for all the suggestions; a necessary qualification is "something Cattitude has already read", so we're probably better off with old favorites than with anything new or obscure.

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

To edit the previous entry, does this URL do the trick?

http://www.livejournal.com/editjournal_do.bml?journal=redbird&itemid=353950 (http://www.livejournal.com/editjournal_do.bml?journal=redbird&itemid=353950)

If it does, let me know whether you want me to walk you through the steps I took to get there.

Thanks.

[redbird]

Yes it does, and now given it's fairly straightforward: that is, I know how to get the itemid, and thus to put it together.

If I'm really lucky, I'll remember this if I ever need to edit a "no-comments" item again.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

tO&FK is a lot more misogynistic, but I wouldn't say less good, and it has a lot more of the Questing Beast in it.

Re: Thanks.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

I didn't know what the blue pencil meant until I needed to edit an entry in a community this summer. I always used the link 'Edit entries' on the side-bar ('Most recent/Last 20')...

Yes, SinS is wonderful - I started reading it in German when I was studying that language, also marvellous :-)

[treadpath.livejournal.com]

Are you only considering classics? If not, I very much recommend "Songs of Earth and Power" by Greg Bear. I just finished it and really enjoyed it.

I also just read "The DaVinci Code," which, while being a page turner and fairly suspenseful, disappointed me in that it's about codes and cryptography and I could figure the codes out faster than the characters (who are supposed to be professional cyptographers and symbologists). The chapters, however, are well-organized and fairly short... with the drawback that you may not want to stop after one. The book is a bit like a can of Pringles...

As for classics, I did enjoy "Vanity Fair" by Thackeray. Apparently, They (the nine people in the sky) are making a movie of it starring Reese Witherspoon. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.

I think it's cool you guys read to each other. :)

[lcohen]

the tone of the three other parts is so different from that first part (well in my copy of tO&FK, Sword is the first of four parts). i like all of it, but i don't think of tO&FK as good reading aloud fodder. but that could be personal preference. i like all of it--my copy is falling apart from rereading it so many times. yes, more misogynistic but it asks interesting questions.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

If you can find a copy, William Kotzwinkle's Christmas at Fontaine's reads aloud very well. It's entertaining and even seasonal -- about the winter holiday season at a large Fifth Avenue department store. Coming back from one Fourth Street, we (intelligentrix, whumpdotcom, and a fourth person WINOLJ & who shall remain nameless) had such a good time reading the book aloud in the car that we had to negotiate who got custody when (in order to finish reading it).

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

The year I was ten - I think - my mum read me and my brother, a year older than me, the whole of The Once And Future King, beginning to end. I think she'd initially just meant to do The Sword in the Stone, but when she got to the end of the first book we wanted her to go on, so she did. I didn't read the fifth book till years and years later, and have never managed quite to tie it into the first four in my head.

In T.H.White's notes on the quartet, or quintet, he says that The Morte d'Arthur, on which The Once and Future King is solidly based, is quite clearly a kind of alternate fantasy universe, in which the Angevin kings never happened: Uther Pendragon and Arthur Pendragon take the place of the kings who ruled England for four centuries, and the whole thing is intentionally tangled up historically.

I've read a couple of T.H.White's other books - two nonfiction, one about learning falconry from a medieval handbook and with a wild goshawk from Ireland, and one a kind of yearbook, England Have My Bones (http://www2.netdoor.com/~moulder/thwhite/ehmb_b.html). Also a couple of his non-Arthurian novels, The Master and Mistress Masham's Repose (which is a fabulous short novel, the sort written for children that is equally enjoyable read as an adult).

Do go on with The Once and Future King. IMO, The Ill-Made Knight is the best novel ever written about Lancelot.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

After "The Sword and The Stone," as you read it (with snarky comments), I think one ought to read "The Princess Bride." It may not have the same impact if you've read it already, or even if you're familiar with the movie (though the book has lots of good snarky comments that they had to leave out of the movie.)

If the reader has *enormous* composure, I recommend "Illegal Aliens," by Nick Pollata and Phil Foglio. Some of it is a little dated by now, but it still makes me giggle until I have trouble breathing.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

The best book in the world is Rafi Zabor's "The Bear Comes Home" and we recommend it to everyone.

K.

[tamiam.livejournal.com]

I liked all of the T.H. White books as a kid, and just re-read them last year to see if I still liked them, and I did. Got all caught up in them again, and thought The Once and Future King was just fine. I've always like the title, and it would come back to me every once in awhile as I grew up as a metaphysical comment on life.

I may go back and re-read them again. Thanks for the post.

what springs to mind

[maryread.livejournal.com]

What she said above about Mistress Masham's Repose.

For something rather different, but highly readable, and with similar roots in a long tradition, you might try Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

[kristenj.livejournal.com]

I love hearing that people read aloud to each other!

Recently I read to Chris "To Say Nothing of the Dog," by Connie Willis, which was a great read-aloud. The last book Chris read to me was "Montana 1948," by Larry Watson, a powerful book.

I would recommend to you "The Translator," by John Crowley, a beautiful and profound work.

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

Depending on whether you're staying with F&SF, and whether you're sticking with nominally-children's books (I tend to consider certain books "for children of all ages"), I might suggest:

The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper (Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King, and Silver on the Tree.

Pretty much anything by Robin McKinley. The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword might make better reading-aloud fodder than other works such as Deeerskin. I also recommend her The Outlaws of Sherwood to you as the retelling of the Robin Hood story which I enjoy the most, and which stubbornly insists on being canonical in my head.

Most anything by Tamora Pierce. I recommend the Tortall series (Song of the Lioness quartet, the Immortals quartet, the Protector of the Small quartet, the Trickster duo [the first of which is newly released]) over the Winding Circle books (Magic Circle quartet, The Circle Opens quartet); although the latter are reasonably good, they aren't as good as the former.

At least the first three of the Wizardry books by Diane Duane (So You Want to be a Wizard?, Deep Wizardry, High Wizardry). There are more books in the series, and I've enjoyed them, but I haven't known them as long so I'm not as certain recommending them.

[gummitch.livejournal.com]

It's worth pointing out, perhaps, that the version of TSitS which is contained within TO&FK has some different adventures compared to the stand-alone.

[red-queen.livejournal.com]

Oooo, Susan Cooper is great. Also, Tamsin, by Peter S. Beagle (recent Long Reading here), Diana Wynne Jones, and (an early love of mine) The Thirteen Clocks. For that matter, Chitty ^2 Bang^2 (which dad read to us when we were kids, since a pair of fraternal twins are the protagonists). Why am I telling Old Story Readers what to read? Sheesh. Talk about your coals to Newcastle :-).