By Lord Dunsany
Sadly I had never read Lord Dunsany before and since I have roughly 300(!!) or so books waiting to be read I decided to finally start reading his work and see if it held up to the wonderful things that other writers had said about the author. It did. Man, did it ever. Dunsany possessed a lyrical fluid verbosity with prose which put you in mind of Shakespeare in some ways. It's not enough to say that H.P. Lovecraft bit off of Dunsany. In some places he devoured him whole. Although The King of Elfland's Daughter (TKED) is a short book, it is incredibly dense and will leave you wanting more.
To just digress for a moment in J.R.R Tolkien's legendarium elves and humans do not normally intermarry and when they do there's often tragedy. Elves are virtually immortal and ageless while humans of course deteriorate rapidly from an elvish POV and die like mayflies. The two peoples experience Time differently and have slightly different relationships to their Creator. Humans are jealous of elves' immortality and fearful (thanks to the Enemy's lies) of the Gift of Death. Elves do not understand human haste and restlessness and seeming need of change for change's sake. Humans who seek after elvish immortality are dabbling in things they do not understand and generally come to very bad ends indeed. Tolkien just paints this in very broad strokes though and moves on to other things in most of the works published in his lifetime.
In TKED Dunsany dove a little deeper and actually made a pretty compelling tale of the problems that a mixed marriage might bring. In Elfland Time does not exist or moves at such a slow state that it is virtually nullified. There is no rush to do anything. Moments of bliss can literally last for eternity. Of course while Time stands still in Elfland it rushes in the mortal world. A human who spends what he thinks of as a short time in Elfland may return to the mortal word and find that a decade or more has passed. Similarly an elf or other denizen of Elfland may come to our world and be excited and more than a little frightened by the constant change of seasons, people aging, sunsets and moonrises and all of the other things which humans take for granted. An elf has no religion and sees no reason why she shouldn't worship the stars. In TKED you get an idea of how far love would have to stretch when a human would have to find the words to explain to an elf that laughing and singing at funerals or talking to goats is not considered proper.
She wore a crown that seemed to be carved of great pale sapphires; she shone on those lawns and gardens like a dawn coming unaware, out of long night, on some planet nearer to us than the sun...And Alveric gazed in her eyes all speechless and powerless still; it was indeed the Princess Lirazel in her beauty.
Know then that in Elfland are colours more deep than are in our fields, and the very air there glows with so deep a lucency that all things seen there have something of the look of our trees and flowers in June reflected in water.TKED is a great little novel (almost short enough to be a short story) about the perils of inviting magic in your life, the glory and madness of true love, and how sometimes you should be careful what you ask for. Good stuff. But for the last time what makes this story stand out is not the plot or the characters but the language. It's a fairy tale in the best sense of the term.
Fearless Jones
by Walter Mosley
In this book the first sort of man is Paris Minton. Minton is a relatively short man who doesn't have a lot of luck with ladies and generally keeps a low profile as much as he can. He's a go along to get along type of fellow. He runs a used bookstore, one which he maintains despite routine harassment from racist cops. He doesn't make a lot of money from his business but it's enough to pay his rent and allow him to do what he likes to do best all day, which is read and not bother or be bothered by people.
One day Minton is minding his own business when a beautiful woman runs into his store and asks him if a Reverend Grove is there. Once Minton stops drooling over her looks he explains that Grove had a church down the street but moved out a short while before. She's in despair and runs into Minton's back room. A thug comes in asking for the woman and then beats Minton like a rented mule. Once he's awake Minton runs into the woman again. Her name is Elana Love. She tells him a rather fantastic story, makes love to him, and then steals his car. Confused Minton goes back to his shop only to find out that someone burned it down. And suddenly people are shooting at him.
This was a good read but quite complex. You might have to occasionally go back a few chapters and see who a seemingly small character really was. I liked that though. It will stretch your reading comprehension in a good way.
