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Originally Posted by cearbhallain
If I had read those as an adult, instead of the teenager I was when they came out, I would not have bothered to finish the first one. As it was, I kept a slip of paper in each volume on which I would write down the unfamiliar words. Once the book was finished I looked them all up. It was a novelty at the time to be reading something with unfamiliar vocabulary. Now I realize that it was just one more way to pad out a novel. Maybe someone here knows: Was Donaldson paid by the word?
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Did you count how many he got wrong?
Someone else I know had a dim view of Donaldson's use of the practice: if you want to use unfamiliar words, at least use them correctly. Gene Wolfe is an example of someone who
does. Donaldson, alas, has a less stellar record.
But no, he didn't get paid by the word. Magazines pay that way. Book publishers do not.
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Let me add one moment of "fairness". At the time, I hadn't really explored the idea of the anti-hero, and Thomas Covenant is an interesting example as he stumbles through an unfamiliar world wielding power he has neither earned nor understands. The theme is consistent, he lives in an insular reality and he's not immediately changed by being dropped into a different world. He's not a "big picture" guy and at 15 that is very easy to relate to.
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I read the first three Thomas Covenant books with reasonable pleasure, largely because they
weren't Yet Another Tolkien Clone. I read the second set with a sort of grim determination to finish them. I've felt no desire to reread them, nor read for the first time anything else Donaldson wrote.
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Dennis