Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Years later, I encountered E. R. Eddison's _The Worm Ouroboros_, in a Ballantine PB edition. Introduced to fantasy by Tolkien, I'd been reading broadly in the genre, looking for things that weren't simply quest tales. I encountered "THERE was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old low house in Wasdale, set in a gray old garden where yew-trees flourished that had seen Vikings in Copeland in their seedling time."
This was quite another matter. Eddison was a Victorian gentleman that wrote Elizabethan prose. I bounced off, till I learned to relax and let the book read itself to me, rather than actively read it myself. Once the taste was acquired, the prose went down like fine cognac, and I understood why Ursula K. Le Guin should single out Eddison's work in her volume of essays The language of the night: essays on fantasy and science fiction
If I'd followed your dictum, I'd have passed on both of these, for not grabbing me from the first few pages.
I could probably come up with other examples, and I'm sure others here could as well. While I concur that it's an author's job to interest me, it's my job to keep an open mind, free as I can of preconceptions about what I might find of interest, and stay aware that unfamiliar style, structure, or subject does not equate to bad book.
It may in fact be a bad book, for reasons I can technically analyze. It may be a decent book that just doesn't do it for me. It may be a book I'm not in the mood for then, but may pick up at another time and read with pleasure. Regardless, a chapter is likely not sufficient evidence one way or the other.
______
Dennis
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You just inspired me to try
The Worm Ouroboros.
I agree with you. Some books don't give away their riches without a little effort on the reader's part, espcially if it's a type of prose that one is not used to.