Little, Big discussion

Reading Little,Big isn't so much an endeavor of reading a book, but becoming emersed in in a fantasy. The author seamlessly moves the reader from real to fantasy and back again with his prose with such facility that the reader may never notice the switch and accepts everything at face value.

This is the most memorable book I have read recently. I wish there were another shelf labeled REREADING because that is where this book now sits.

I'm completely stalled on this book. I'm more than half way done with the book but I haven't picked it up in a while. Do you think that I'm just at a slow point and it gets better after that? I don't want to completely give up on the book especially because you and other readers seem to love it so much.

Thanks.

This is one of my all-time Top 5 books--if not my favorite. Crowley takes every nuance and bit of lore from faery tales and stories and fluidly and gracefully incorporates them into the rich fabric of his tale. I found the book to be profound, moving, and paradoxical in that it has a wonderful dream-like quality while still, in the end, being firmly in the magical realist genre. His sentences are truly beautiful and the text is sensual in unexpected ways. I have read this book 3 times and still, when I come back to it and re-read it, I find it to be a deep well of riches.

Please--give it another try. Take your time with it and it will open up.

Niche,

I once started and stopped Little, Big also. I picked it up years later and read it straight through and loved it. Go figure.

-andy

I finished Little, Big last week. It's the book of the month topic for April for the Speculative Worlds and Fantasy Afficianados groups. It took over two weeks for me to get through the book, but I am glad that I did. There is a lot there, and I suspect I would get more out of it if I reread it, but I think I will wait a year or two to do that. Niche, if the part where you stalled was when the focus shifted to Ariel Hawksquill, I could certainly understand that. I felt frustrated at times at the number of new characters who kept appearing. They all tie together eventually, but I spent a lot of time looking at the family tree chart in the front of the book, trying to figure out the relationships.

This is my number one all-time favorite piece of fiction EVER. The writing is so incredibly good--Crowley is a flat-out master of language. This tale is one of his stand-alones. He never wrote any sequels, (thank GOD!) and never went back to the setting or characters. But it made me snap up the rest of his stuff as soon as I could find it. This tale is utterly magical--in a way that other books that deal with fairies and magic just aren't. It is at times inexplicably obtuse--but if you learn more about the backgrounds he describes (such as the things Ariel researches) you will understand more.

If you really enjoyed this book, I would suggest his three-book series about Blackberry Jambs--a small town in upstate NY. This is another of those dense, historically packed stories--and it can be amazingly confusing because two main characters have the same name; but it is another of those tales that incorporate magic and alchemy and history into a modern-day story that enchants. I will warn you, it is a very difficult series to read, but if you like Crowley's writing, it is amazing. The books are Aegypt, Love and Sleep and Daemonomania. You definitely need to read them in order.

Of all the books I ever read, this is my top favorite of all time. I've got hundreds of favorites, but this is the best one.

It is one of those rare books that you can re-read many times. I first read it 25+ years ago, and I have re-read it possibly 10 times since, and I still want to re-read it again.
I have ordered a special 25th anniversary edition that will come out soon with art by Peter Milton (see http://www.littlebig25.com/). It says 25th anniversary, but it has taken 5 years+ to get this edition published, but it is almost finished now.

There is an audiobook of Little, Big, read by the author. I listened to some of it before my copy, sadly, was destroyed in a fire. The author reads very well. I would recommend the audiobook to any one who prefers being read to to reading. Also, if you spend a lot of time driving, listening to this audio book is a good way to pass the time.