Well, day six of this challenge and I already feel like I'm running out of steam! I guess I always knew the start would be difficult, juggling daily posting with the week of my exams! But yesterday's went ok, and I've got a few days off before I go back on Friday for what will hopefully be my last exam ever. So due to lack of time, there's no pictures in this post. Sorry. But I can promise lots of pretty fiber art related pictures in tomorrow's WIP update (although, thanks to Friday also being an exam day, tomorrow will include mostly FOs rather than WIPs!).
On to the subject at hand then. Of all the genres, fantasy has to be my favourite. My favourite books as a child were the Redwall series (you may recall my post when the author, Brian Jacques, died earlier this year), which have a very strong fantasy element to them. My dad insisted I read Lord of the Rings, which I managed on my second attempt. By my teenage years, I had started playing Dungeons and Dragons with some friends, and was introduced to the David Eddings books. Oddly enough, I didn’t encounter David Gemmell or Raymond E. Feist until much later. I still haven’t read most of David Gemmell’s books.
I love most forms of fantasy. Epic, magic-heavy stories like Feist’s Magician are just as good as more “realistic” low-fantasy settings such as Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy, or George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. I also have a hefty selection of historical fantasy novels including Bernard Cornwell and Conn Iggulden.
Fantasy films feature heavily in any lists I compile of my favourite movies. My all time favourite film from my youth has to be The Dark Crystal (although oddly enough, I didn’t see Labyrinth or The Princess Bride till I was much older). I love the Lord of the Rings movies, and I’m looking forward to the adaptation of The Hobbit. The original Clash of the Titans is also a firm favourite, although I think I’m the only person I know who also likes the recent remake.
Just looking through my “fantasy” section on my DVD shelf now, I can see I like movies from right the way across the fantasy spectrum. Vampire/Werewolf movies sit alongside traditional swashbucklers and historical fantasies.
I’m not precious about the books I read though – I’m not the sort of person who refuses to like a movie adaptation of my favourite book just because they got the colour of his horse wrong. Yes, there were things about the LotR movies that annoyed me, but they’re still good films. I appreciate you could never directly translate the full complexity of A Game of Thrones to a TV series, but HBO have done a fantastic job, and the series is every bit as compelling as the books. The casting is superb (of course, I am also a massive Sean Bean fan, so that helps).
Even films/series which differ greatly from the books I love. When True Blood first started, Jamie bought me the box set of Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries. I thought the books were awesome (in fact, I just finished re-reading them and the two further novels I didn’t already have), but the TV series is so different you just can’t get annoyed by it. HBO took the books, and turned them from something good into something amazing. Anyone narrow-minded enough to declare “It’s not the same as the books, so I’m not going to watch it!” is seriously missing out!
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