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Books

May 31, 2008
3 comments

1. Secret Societies
2. 1984
3. Animal Farm
4. Cicero
5. Catch-22
6. Dumb Witness
7. Lord of the Flies
8. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
9. Ulysses
10. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
11. The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time
12. Girl With A Pearl Earring
13. Candide
14. For One More Day
15. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

16. King Arthur by Norma Lorre Goodrich

King Arthur

Norma L. Goodrich

If ever there was a book that encapsulated a comprehensive historical search for King Arthur, I think this is the one. Using geography, linguistics and descriptive reference, Dr. Goodrich has pieced together interesting historical locations and true personages surrounding the legend and mythos of Arthur. To give you a taste:

-Arthur owned no land; he married Guinvere, a Queen and vast landowner in her own right.
-Lancelot was equal in stature to Arthur as a King himself, of the Scots.
-The Round Table was a place of worship for the early Celtic Christian church before Roman Catholicism.
-Arthur was a brilliant tactician, both on land and a sea.
-Guinevere was long dead when Arthur left to fight on the continent and he fought two battles against Mordred on his return.
-The Round Table Fellowship was Arthur's personal bodyguard and would have preceded him in death (thus, Lancelot and Gawain perish in the first battle).
-Arthur's kingdom was central England, on the edge of Scotland, not in Southern England.

There's a lot to this book. Unfortunately, it's not in novel form. Yet it does not read like a textbook. Rather, I feel it reads like a guidebook. And I do feel that the author a few times contradicts herself, first placing the Grail Castle on land, then placing it on Avalon. Upon rereading those passages, I think it's a very poor job of editing because at points I feel she's just writing reference notes down rather than piecing things together.

If you like the mythos of Arthur, I think you'll like this book. I think a lot of ideas here were used in the movie of King Arthur, but it was done terribly (as a movie and as a re-treatment of the characters).

Books

Feb 25, 2008
1 comment

1. Secret Societies
2. 1984
3. Animal Farm
4. Cicero
5. Catch-22
6. Dumb Witness
7. Lord of the Flies
8. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

John Steinbeck

This is actually an unfinished book by John Steinbeck. Being enamored of Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory as a child, he had a huge desire to rewrite the tale into modern English, resolving discrepancies between with other works (or filling in the blanks of story). Instead, he got seriously bogged down in the concept of the work when I think her personally hit his stride. The first few chapters are very much a rewrite, but when he get to the second to the last chapter (regarding Gawain, Gaheris and Marhalt, and especially the last chapter on Lancelot, the story takes on its own life as he becomes comfortable not only with the material but with his own telling of it. It's unfortunate that he stopped working on it and died before returning to its completion. I thought it could have been a great piece of work. At the end there is an Appendix of his correspondence between his editor, his researcher and himself that is very illuminating with regard to what he did to research the topic. Rather than writing from Malory's work, he met with professors, visited locations (Sir Malory's birthplace for instance) and read the original text of other authors. It's worth a read if you like revisiting the tale. Just don't expect to get to the end. If anything, I think you should at least read the Appendix. I think I'll be reading more of his work soon.