By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: , ,

It’s JRR Tolkien’s birthday! Tolkien is, naturally, one of my favorite of all authors. He wasn’t my first foray into epic fantasy–that would be Lloyd Alexander–but Tolkien cemented my love of that genre for keeps. He is, for me, as profound an influence on my own storytelling as George Lucas. Here is one my very favorite passages in a book chock-full of favorite passages. This is from The Return of the King, the chapter titled “The Siege of Gondor”. In rode the Lord of the Nazgul. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to aDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: ,

I didn’t know this until I saw it online today, but The Hobbit was first published 80 years ago today. At no point have I not loved this story (except for the handful of years I was unaware of it), and I don’t expect that I will ever not love it. The Hobbit and its more noted follow-up, The Lord of the Rings, are on my shortlist of the stories that have shaped me the most: we’re talking Star Wars territory here, to be honest. I knew the story of The Hobbit — well, most of it, anyway — severalDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: , ,

George RR Martin lists his Top Ten Fantasy movies. Of course I have thoughts! First off, a stipulation: lists like this are mainly meant to inspire discussion and debate and, being that this is the Internet, rock-throwing and name-calling and aspersion-casting-upon-one’s-children-and-parentage. OK? OK! Second: Well, Martin actually has a pretty good list here. You’ll have to click through to see his comments on each film (worth doing, also for the honorable mentions), but here’s the Top Ten by itself: 1. The Lord of the Rings (complete) 2. The Princess Bride 3. The Wizard of Oz 4. Ladyhawke 5. Dragonslayer 6.Down the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: , , ,

The other day marked the twentieth anniversary of the initial publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (or Philosopher’s Stone, if you live in Britain–and I guess I should link that first since that’s where the book came first). I could wax poetic for quite a long post about Harry Potter and the enormous effects on culture those books had, but others have weighed in more intelligently than I could on those points. I, like many others, have had my own “personal journey” with Harry Potter, starting with sometime in what must have been 1999 when I started noticingDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: ,

I like this show a lot. We watch it every week. But it’s a really maddening show, because there are times it’s so wonderfully written (thank God they’ve got Jane Espenson on the staff), and other when it is so…not (too bad they can’t clone Jane Espenson). :: Snow White / Mary Margaret is kind of irritating. She reminds me of the way Mary Ingalls was always depicted in the Little House books: insufferably good. The current storyline, of forcing her to do evil, could be interesting, but so far all they can figure out what to do is haveDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: ,

I have to admit to feeling somewhat nervous about the prospects for the movie version of The Hobbit over the last few years. It’s a much more ‘filmable’ story than The Lord of the Rings, much more straight-forward in its tale, and I figured that, if anything, it would make a nice single movie. But then stuff started leaking out about Peter Jackson and company adding stuff to it, from the various appendices, notes, and other materials JRR Tolkien left lying about, indicating what generally went on during the more than fifty years that take place between The Hobbit andDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: , ,

That’s the title of Guy Gavriel Kay’s next novel: River of Stars. As I noted before, it is set in the same fictional China as his last book, the amazing Under Heaven, albeit several hundred years later, so it’s not really a sequel at all. And now we have the cover art: I never finished re-reading my way through GGK’s output prior to Under Heaven‘s release, so this winter should be my chance…. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: ,

Oh my good Lord. I tried, folks. I really tried. I’ve wanted so much to love A Song of Ice and Fire as much as everybody else does. And after the fairly soul-crushing experience that was slogging my way through A Feast for Crows, I thought that A Dance with Dragons was off to a fairly decent start. But I wasn’t even halfway through before that old familiar feeling started to settle in, and by the time I was two-thirds of the way through (with more than 300 pages left at that point), I had pretty firmly reached this point:Down the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: , , , ,

Hey, I made it! It’s the end of the A-to-Z Challenge. Let’s look at some Zaniness, shall we? According to this site, the word ‘zany’ was first used in English by none other than William Shakespeare, although its origins are apparently Italian: Somebody zany is amusingly crazy or clownish. If you object to my definition, then you may be in the company of the compilers of several current dictionaries. It’s a hard word to pin down — we all think we know what we mean by it, but we may find describing it in plain English surprisingly hard. That mayDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: , ,

YAHHHH? What on Earth is that? Well, it’s a rough transliteration of the final death shriek of Red Leader at the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. He’s just led an unsuccessful attack run on the two-meter-wide thermal exhaust port, failing to get his proton torpedoes to go down the shaft to the reactor (“Negative! It didn’t go it. Just impacted on the surface.”). He orders Red Five (Luke) to gather the remaining pilots (Wedge and Biggs) for one last shot at the exhaust port, before his ship is struck by blaster fire from DarthDown the rabbit hole….