belated notice

It has come to my attention that I failed to mention it here when I posted my most recent recommendation to the website. I'm still behind, I'm afraid, but at least March's is up now: Stardust, by Neil Gaiman. And I should be able to get back on track fairly soon.

catching up

I'm making good on that promise to catch up with my recommendations.

For those who are new to my journal, a quick story. Last year, finding that my spare time for reading was scanty enough that maintaining a monthly fiction recommendation was getting hard, I set aside three months of the year (April, August, and December) for "primary source" recommendations (or folklore recommendations, as I call them on the page). My reason was that these sources are the bedrock on which fantasy is built, but few people seem to read them. And I particularly wanted to bring them to the attention of fantasy writers, since the genre as a whole will be well-served if its people familiarize themselves with something more than an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation, the way it so often seems to go. (Tobias Buckell has a good piece on this called "Original Source Creativity," though at present I can't find it on his site.)

Last year's primary sources were Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and the Old Testament -- three foundational works with a profound effect on English literature. I like the idea of organizing these around a theme, so this shall be the Classical Year, opening with the Iliad.

And with that, I'm back on schedule, provided I can get something posted for May in the next twenty-three days. That should be manageable, right?