Just to start out, I’m actually eleven books behind in my posts (this is book 14 for 2008, but I’m currently reading book 25), so things may move a bit quickly for the next few days. I don’t mind saying that these David Eddings books are guilty pleasures for me. Normally I dislike the notion of “guilty pleasure”; you shouldn’t feel guilt about enjoying any kind of reading, but one thing I think my institutional literary education taught me (an important lesson, I feel) is to distinguish between my enjoyment of a book and its quality. There are books I enjoy that are bad books, and there are books I do not enjoy that are excellent books, and I think an intelligent reader needs to be able to see that. I can see that, though I love the ten books that make up The Belgariad and The Malloreon, I know that they aren’t really quality literature. They are fun adventure stories that are in a heavy dialogue with Tolkien and his followers, but they aren’t much more than that. Eddings himself has no illusions:
The story itself is fairly elemental—Good vs. Evil, Nice Guys vs. Nasty Guys, (or Them vs. Us). It has the usual Quest, the Magic (or Holy) Thingamajig, the Mighty Sorcerer, the Innocent Hero, and the Not Quite So Innocent Heroine—along with a widely varied group of Mighty Warriors with assorted character faults. It wanders around for five books until it finally climaxes with the traditional duel between “Our Hero” and the “Bad Guy.” (Would it spoil anything for you if I tell you that our side wins?)
Reading these books is like taking a vacation in my childhood, and I feel safe and warm when I’m curled up with them. I do wish that Del Rey would give us some covers that are more like what Tor did with Phyllis Gotlieb’s Flesh & Gold. I really, really hate these terrible airbrush paintings that look like the artist was channeling Boris Vallejo.
Up next, Queen of Sorcery, by David Eddings.
