I've been meaning to say...

[teenybuffalo]

Lately I've been reading Lilith by George Macdonald at Project Gutenberg.  Friends have spoken highly of Macdonald's work in recent months, including The Princess and the Goblins but not limited to it.  I'd never really gotten into anything else of his, but I felt it was time that I tried.

Lilith is wonderful and cracktastic and very uneven in tone

Comments

[csecooney]

"Headlong Hall" is great. So is Headstrong. The name could change depending on its daily behavior. (Reminds me of Ysabeau Wilce's sentient houses in the Flora Segunda books. Crackpot Hall, etc.)

I think I've only read the North wind story by MacDonald, although I've encountered bits of Princess and Goblin here and there.

[teenybuffalo]

And yet again I realize I need to be reading the Flora Segunda books! This is A Sign. I'll hit the library this afternoon.

[csecooney]

OH, HELP! You will love them! If you were a corpse, you'd turn somersaults in your grave for sheer joyful DELIGHT of them!

Now I want to read them again, dang it.

[teenybuffalo]

*wump*wump*wump*

That's me, turning in my grave.

[sovay]

This is sufficiently un-cute that it might as well have been illustrated by Henry Darger.

Man, an edition of Lilith illustrated by Henry Darger would have awesome

This is my favorite of his books, although I also like Phantastes, which is I think supposed to be a fairly straightforward allegory in the guise of a fairytale and keeps getting waylaid by MacDonald's id, thus rendering it full of sometimes gorgeously illuminated and sometimes plain old WTF.

[teenybuffalo]

Phantastes was the one that C.S. Lewis bought on the Leatherhead station platform, and which blew his young mind. I feel obliged to read it, simply on that account, even aside from its being good. Macdonald turns up as the Virgil figure to Lewis's Dante in The Great Divorce, which I've always liked.