This is not the right crowd and you know it
Okay, so my physical health has imploded along with my plans for the day and I am in a terrible mood, but I think I would still be disagreeing with David Eddings.
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skygiants recently re-read The Belgariad. The comments section is appropriate-ironically epic. In the course of pursuing a theory proposed by pedanther—who seems to have been totally right—I found an interview with Eddings. I am not sure when exactly it was conducted; his remarks about prequels suggest sometime between 1991 and 1995, but honestly I don't feel that knowing the year would make much difference to how impressively I disagree with almost everything he says that is not a fact of his personal history and maybe even a couple of those (you cannot cite your intellectual differences with a female parakeet as reasonable scaffolding for your difficulties in writing human women, my dude, or at least you cannot do it without sounding like a dick). For whatever reason, though, this particular glaring ignorance is sticking with me:
"You can have a character say, 'Gee, they bounced one of my cheques' in a contemporary story and everybody will know what they're talking about. But in fantasy you have to invent the entire banking system. You have to invent the theology, sociology and everything else. And when you begin as I did, by dropping three or four aeons of western European culture into a blender—when you throw in peoples who are essentially ancient Romans, French and Spanish noblemen, Vikings and Muslims—when you put all that together and press the 'on' button you get a very strange mix of anachronisms. It gets you thinking about what sort of world it would be with Romans and Arabs living next to each other, for instance."
DUDE IT WOULD LOOK LIKE OUR ACTUAL HISTORY. SO WOULD THE INTERACTION OF VIKINGS AND MUSLIMS. ALSO PLEASE TELL ME THE ISLAMIC WORLD WAS NOT YOUR MODEL FOR THE ANGARAKS BECAUSE IF SO THE ORIENTALISM IN THESE BOOKS JUST WENT SO FAR PAST ELEVEN IT EXCEEDED ESCAPE VELOCITY AND BLASTED OFF INTO THE STARS AND THE STARS REALLY DID NOT DESERVE THAT.
I am sure someone yelled at Eddings in his lifetime about his conceptions of history and anachronism. I don't see how you could not. But I just found them and I am beginning to feel that Santayana should be revised: those who cannot remember the past are not only condemned to repeat it, they are condemned to reinvent it and believe they have created something totally unprecedented—strange enough for high fantasy—when in fact it was just people's lives. Even in high-gloss extruded fantasy product, that annoys me. The end, no moral. Just, seriously, don't do that.
skygiants recently re-read The Belgariad. The comments section is appropriate-ironically epic. In the course of pursuing a theory proposed by pedanther—who seems to have been totally right—I found an interview with Eddings. I am not sure when exactly it was conducted; his remarks about prequels suggest sometime between 1991 and 1995, but honestly I don't feel that knowing the year would make much difference to how impressively I disagree with almost everything he says that is not a fact of his personal history and maybe even a couple of those (you cannot cite your intellectual differences with a female parakeet as reasonable scaffolding for your difficulties in writing human women, my dude, or at least you cannot do it without sounding like a dick). For whatever reason, though, this particular glaring ignorance is sticking with me:"You can have a character say, 'Gee, they bounced one of my cheques' in a contemporary story and everybody will know what they're talking about. But in fantasy you have to invent the entire banking system. You have to invent the theology, sociology and everything else. And when you begin as I did, by dropping three or four aeons of western European culture into a blender—when you throw in peoples who are essentially ancient Romans, French and Spanish noblemen, Vikings and Muslims—when you put all that together and press the 'on' button you get a very strange mix of anachronisms. It gets you thinking about what sort of world it would be with Romans and Arabs living next to each other, for instance."
DUDE IT WOULD LOOK LIKE OUR ACTUAL HISTORY. SO WOULD THE INTERACTION OF VIKINGS AND MUSLIMS. ALSO PLEASE TELL ME THE ISLAMIC WORLD WAS NOT YOUR MODEL FOR THE ANGARAKS BECAUSE IF SO THE ORIENTALISM IN THESE BOOKS JUST WENT SO FAR PAST ELEVEN IT EXCEEDED ESCAPE VELOCITY AND BLASTED OFF INTO THE STARS AND THE STARS REALLY DID NOT DESERVE THAT.
I am sure someone yelled at Eddings in his lifetime about his conceptions of history and anachronism. I don't see how you could not. But I just found them and I am beginning to feel that Santayana should be revised: those who cannot remember the past are not only condemned to repeat it, they are condemned to reinvent it and believe they have created something totally unprecedented—strange enough for high fantasy—when in fact it was just people's lives. Even in high-gloss extruded fantasy product, that annoys me. The end, no moral. Just, seriously, don't do that.
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It is a serious definition of chutzpah, yes.
But yeah... these all definitely only worked before my brain had much in the way of critical thought going for it.
I sometimes find it interesting to re-read books that I encountered first before the age of reason, or at least the age of discernment. Sometimes they are still really good! Sometimes they aren't good at all, but I can tell what I found important about them. I am not just sure it's worth the suffering to try it with these books, though.
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Also I'm pretty sure I'd never remember all the things I read and loved if I tried to just sit down and come up with them all. I definitely have had multiple points of others launching into a book and saying, "wait until you hear about this ridiculous thing I read!" and then I realize I recognize that ridiculous thing. :D
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I'm not sure I think of it as correcting impressions. Sometimes I just want to know if what I saw in them was there to begin with. (Answer: yes, as far as I can remember, but sometimes not as narratively prominent as I thought and often not as well written and very often jammed in with a bunch of other stuff I had totally forgotten.)
I also think appreciating-books-me is much less nuanced than appreciating-music-me, and anything where I do remember the value, it's pretty much just always going to be "oh, I loved that character and their dialogue" and probably never anything else.
I think that's a perfectly valid mode of appreciating books.
I definitely have had multiple points of others launching into a book and saying, "wait until you hear about this ridiculous thing I read!" and then I realize I recognize that ridiculous thing.
I absolutely do not keep a comprehensive searchable catalogue of everything I've read in my brain. It's one of the reasons I am terrible at answering the question about favorite [x]; first of all in most cases I don't think I have a singular favorite, secondly how would I remember all possible iterations unless I'm listing them for myself or conversing with someone else?
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I was trying to put together a list of "Those Foods I Always Cook" and therefore can do reliably to offer a friend who's expecting. You'd think "I decide to cook it reasonably frequently" would be the sort of thing you could drag a list out of your head for, but apparently no, I can't do that, let alone books I may have read once fifteen years ago.