• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Lud-in-the-Mist

tartan_skirt

New Member
As part of my fantasy fiction course this year, I read Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, the classic fantasy book about illegal fairy fruit and goblins. Personally, I think it's an amazing book and a really enjoyable read, if a little confusing to figure out thematically (which doesn't mar my enjoyment of it at all). What I don't get is why it's such an unknown book today. It's part of the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series, and The Gollancz Ultimate Fantasies Sequence, but I hadn't even heard of the publisher until I got my copy in the post (and the latter series of books is pretty hard to find any information about online). Perhaps if I had actually read more Neil Gaiman I would have heard of it sooner, as he is a fan and used the book as inspiration for Stardust.

Who has read it, and what did you think? How did you hear about it? If you do like/love it, do you recommend it to people, or do we for some reason like to keep relatively unknown gems like this hidden away for ourselves like a jealous treasure-hoarding dragon (why yes, I have been reading too much Earthsea lately...). Are books like this a mark of the obscurity of one's fantasy reading, only to be talked about in some kind of nerdy one-upmanship battle of wits?

Since reading it, other than people on my course, I have found one other fantasy reader who has read it. Everyone I know who has read it enjoyed it greatly, so why the secrecy? For such a wonderful piece of the fantasy cannon, it seems strange that it has fallen into the shadows. :confused:
 
Back
Top