"Casey Rousseau" <casey at trinityhartford.org> writes: > I'm curious. A question especially for those who responded strongly to my > recommendation for the Covenant series, how old were you when you read them, > if you recall. I, for example, do not recall the rape scene mentioned by > someone as being at the begining of the first one - Lord Foul's Bane - > although I think I do remember a human sacrifice. It has been many years > since I went back an reread this one. Ususally I'll start with The Illearth > War if I want to dip back into it. I definitely read them before The One > Tree came out in April of '82 which means I was not yet 12 and may have been > only 10 when I started reading these. I read the very first of the Covenant series, and no others. I read it when it was first released, which would be 1977; so I was 23 at the time. I don't recall the rape business at all either, I don't think I especially noticed it as a big deal at the time. Unpleasant characters committing rapes was hardly a new thing in fiction, and this one didn't strike me as especially significant. I just found the entire book both boring and unpleasant in all possible ways. I found the characters to be unpleasant people and not believable, and I found the use of language to be very poor. I didn't mind his use of archaic words (lots of people do that, Gene Wolfe did it much more extensively and brilliantly in the New Sun books), but I minded that he used some of them *too much*, and he used them incorrectly. The prose just limped and clunked for me. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net / http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/ John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net Dragaera mailing lists, see http://dragaera.info