Around the Year in 52 Books discussion

The Sword in the Stone This book is for my week 31: a work of young adult fiction, the first book I plan to read in 2016. It has been in my bookshelf for most of my life and for some reason, I've never managed to get past the first few pages. I've been decluttering my house (including books) and I'm at the point where either I read the book, or pass it on to a secondhand shop!

This is a story about King Arthur when he was a child. In it, he meets and becomes the student of Merlyn the magician. During the six years that Arthur (Wart, which rhymes with Art) is under Merlyn's tutelage, he learns all manner of useful things, such as what it is like to be a fish, a hawk, or a badger.

It's a book where animals talk and Wart can travel through time (with Merlyn) and meets with giants, witches, knights, and strange beasts.

I just finished this and loved it. I found it fanciful and enjoyed its descriptions. I had read in reviews that other readers were distracted by how White failed to stick to the Arthurian period: Merlyn for example is said to be wearing running shorts one day. Early on though, Merlyn says that he lives his life backward, thus explaining the inconsistencies.

I just discovered that this "book" is part of A Once And Future King, now on my tbr list. This means that, page-wise, I will have "read" it twice according to goodreads. My local library only has the book containing the whole series together, not the individual volumes, so I can't go through it as originally published.

Five stars. What took me so long to read this?

I hated this book. But I think that a lot of that comes down to humor and how everyone has a different sense thereof.

The books reads as though they were written by an 8th grader who read a particularly boring (and long) book and hated it, but now has to stand in front of the class and give a summary of that book.

This idea of a shortened version of a longer tale worked well in the Princess Bride, but here it is the voice of the narrator that annoyed me so badly. In particular, there are a few times where he described the events in terms of modern idea (knights are sports players) where the metaphor helped not at all with understanding the actual story and just confused things. There are also plot points missing (skipped), where I had to look up Arthurian legend online to actually figure out what was going on (this was a bigger issue with Book 3 in the series.)

As to the anachronisms, I've seen in reviews that people either love this or hate it. I was willing to accept that Merlin was 'out of time' and could be modern in a past setting, per the explanation above, but these are not limited to one character and it isn't all uncommon to see things way out of place in time.

MJ mentioned The Once and Future King, which is what I read. This book, The Sword in the Stone is actually book 1 in a 5 book series which tells the whole Arthurian Legend (minus some gaps). The Once and Future King is likely the most well known book by the author (at least over here) but it is actually an Omnibus of Books 1-4. Book 5, The Book of Merlyn, was written around the same time as the first 4 but published almost 2 decades later due to some dispute between the Author and Publisher. As I understand it, White turned the book in and they didn't like it, wanted it rewritten but he wouldn't and eventually it was published as the author wanted (posthumously).