Well, this was a long haul! I liked this book very much once I got into it. The first 5 chapters were a bit painful until I got used to the tone of the story. And the vocabulary! I have an excellent reading vocabulary (although my speaking vocabulary could use some work) and yet there were more than 15 words I didn't even recognize in those chapters! True, most of them were falconry terms - but still, it made me feel stoopit. And I was on an airplane with no dictionary to look up these words - making me feel trapped as well. It was not pretty. But as soon as Merlin came on the scene, I fell in love with him and the book sailed by.
Until Wart pulled the sword from the stone. (I hope I am not giving anything away there.) At that point I realized - this is a heckuva long book and I still have to read a ton more. And so I took a poll. I asked every future senior I came in contact with through church or the Y or randomly running into them at the beach - "What did you think of The Once and Future King?" And after much piercing Veronica Mars-like questioning they all admitted that they liked it fine but they didn't finish it. "AHA!" I yelled (quietly to myself) "This means that I don't have to finish it either!" So I didn't. But I read enough and I promise that before next summer I will finish it. Probably. Geeze, it's long.
There is something about King Arthur and LONG that must be set in stone. (Like the sword - ha!) Because every Arthurian saga is as long as a Indiana freight train. Seriously - Camelot, the musical, is nearly 3 hours long. The Mists of Avalon (A feminist version of the Camelot legend - it is great!) is a whopping 912 pages. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was short but left out, well pretty much everything but the llamas. And even Disney's The Sword in the Stone only used the first section of the book, with a bunch of other made up things. So there.
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