Loved The Sword in the Stone. No plot, but supremely entertaining. They kinda went downhill after that. Especially once Merlin left. A lot of the humor and absurdity that made the first part so good disappeared. And that fit the story, but it was a hard loss still. As it went it seemed to become more and more of an essay on Arthurian legend and less a story. He spent a lot of time explaining the way things were, why characters acted the way they did. At times he even told us outright to pay attention and know what this meant. At one point he pressed on us to know that what just happened was the cause of what would happen later and that this was extremely important. I was not expecting that going in, so it was a bit of a let down.

What I loved, especially early on, was the humor. I just kept finding passages that I wanted to record because I cracked up at them. Again, as the story went on and got darker, that went away. I also liked how it felt like he was just sitting there telling a story. He made references to modern day things and told us how it was similar and differebt than modern day life. It had a real informal feel to it, which I rather enjoyed. Until it became an essay. Again, maybe I just wasn’t ready for it and wasn’t in the right mindset for it, but it started to lose its appeal then. The tone shift fit the story, but still…

The last book did redeem it some. It got off to a rough, very dense, start and ended with the musings of an old man, but in between it got quite personal and emotional. It made me like and care about characters I hadn’t yet liked or didn’t like anymore.

I hadn’t read much Arthurian legend before and my exposure to it is mostly in film and TV (Monty Python, King Arthur, Merlin) so it was cool to read this and see the difference. I always read with my phone by me and I regularly looked up other versions of the story to see how he changed it. I also needed the phone for its use as a dictionary. Whole lotta new words in there and unknown references (still feel like I didn’t understand a large chunk). But it was cool seeing who these characters I’d heard the names of were.

Overall, I give it a 3.5/5. The Sword in the Stone was a solid 4.5 at least and The Candle in the Wind was up to a 4, but I can’t bring myself to rank the rest so high.