A Fantastic Find

I keep remembering things that happened while I was taking a break from blogging. Towards the end of the outlaws' visit, we made a brief sojourn to the local craft shop so that Shirley could stock up on all those patterns that aren't available over there. While that was going on, I sneaked off to Borders to check out the books and DVDs.

First stop: the bargain 3-for-2 table (I'm such a cheapskate) where I made the find of the decade. Book 2 of the THIRD (and, according to the cover notes and strapline, last) Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. Book 2? I hadn't even known Book 1 was out. I'm clearly not spending enough time in book shops.

Twenty years ago, the first and second Covenant trilogies were among my all-time favourites. I devoured them avidly, reading and re-reading the entire series as each new edition was published. I know there were many naysayers around who thought Donaldson's world a cheap imitation of Middle Earth, but I was never one of them. In my view, there's only so many fantasy creatures to go around, so it was entirely sensible that The Land had a people who lived with horses, and giants, and magicians, and a single, powerful, evil overlord - in Donaldson's case, Lord Foul. His narrative style was sufficiently different, his hero even more tentative than Frodo, to make me dismiss suggestions of plagiarism as mere jealousy. I loved the Chronicles, then and now.

Finding that after a gap of twenty years, Donaldson has picked up the story of Linden Avery and returned to the Land centuries after her last visit, gave me a thrill of expectation I haven't experienced for a long, long time. Picking up a copy of book 2 - Fatal Revenant - I almost ran to the fantasy section and soon found a pristine copy of the first book - The Runes of the Earth. On my return home Wikipedia revealed that the Last Chronicles are planned as a tetralogy, with book three expected in 2010 and book four in 2013. That's a long wait, but I know it'll be worth it, and meanwhile I have over a thousand pages to pore over with geeky delight. The only question now is: should I dive right in, or bow to tradition and reread the other six books first?