terry goodkind!?!

[kid_prufrock]

The New Yorker's fantasy recommendations: My faith in that magazine about anything of importance just went down about 40%. Sorry, Seymour Hersh! 'Till next time, David Remnick! Rest in peace, William Shawn

Comments

[carnap]

Maybe next time some guy will ask his accountant buddy about video games or something and write THAT up. Then the modern cultural establishment will know to play Final Fantasy VII!
You've really got me confused here. I thought you were implicating in the post title that the problem with this list is that Goodkind is bad. But here you seem to be implicating that the problem with the Goodkind selection is that he's passé-so 1997-and the New Yorker should have picked someone more contemporary. In which case it seems odd to pick on Goodkind since he's more contemporary than a lot of that list.

Alternatively, the basis of the implicature could be a shared background assumption that FFVII is really bad. This also confuses me, since I though FFVII was supposed to be good. So I'm very puzzled by what you're trying to convey.

(Disclaimer: I have never played FFVII, read anything by Terry Goodkind, or trusted the New Yorker about anything of importance.)

[mumbly_joe]

FFVII was okay. I mean, it's no FFVI. Or FFIX. Those were both much better.

Incidentally, I'd say exactly the same thing about Goodkind's writing.

[sildra]

Well, whether or not FF7 is any good, it's no FF6, because FF6 was my childhood.

[mumbly_joe]

But wait! Don't they know that Terry Goodkind doesn't write fantasy? He writes stories with Important Human Themes.

To be fair, they did have the good sense to point out that each sequel is progressively worse that the last and that a larger and larger chunk of each book is devoted to Objectivist ranting. Not sure why they're recommending it, though.

Look past the Terry Goodkind. That list still sucks.

[alexpshenichkin]

Even beyond the Goodkind thing, those books kinda all seem rather... similar. "You liked Harry Potter and Lords of the Rings and A Wrinkle in Time! Now let's read a bunch of books that all mostly fall into the epic-fantasy-trilogy style! That way you'll learn about fantasy's rich heritage of aping Tolkien but adding more knights!"

This list achingly needs some sword-and-sorcery/sword-and-planet, some "weird fantasy", and some creepy-riffing-on-fairy-tales fantasy.

Or, fuck, if we're New-Yorker-loving "literary adults" here, why don't we go read some Gormenghast?

-- Alex