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Jun 16, 2008

Heather rated it:

Seriously, how do you review the pinnacle of all fantasy? You can argue with me, but that, in my opinion, is what The Once and Future King is. Sure, the evil enchantresses are stout and grumpy, the magical castles are made out of food, the lily maids are fat and of a certain age, and the knights in shining armor refer to one another as ‘old chap’s. Oh and did I mention that King Arthur’s nickname is ‘the Wart’?
Somehow, T.H. White takes the legend, undresses it, and gives it a new kind of More...

0 comments like (23 people liked it)

Jun 21, 2009

Corinne rated it:

This book terrified me, on many levels. It's 667 pages long, to begin with. It's been a while since I read a serious chunkster like that (besides Harry Potter, which somehow in my mind doesn't really count...).

Besides that, I am just not a fan of "Authur" stories, despite my deep love of the Disney movie The Sword and the Stone, of course. Ever since I saw the musical "Camelot" in the theater when I was in high school, the story just didn't appeal to me. Then my b More...

10 comments like (25 people liked it)

Jan 17, 2008

Jeremy rated it:

I read this book about every two years. It is one of my absolute favorites. The stories and the characters are so well-crafted that I can read it over-and-over time and again with just as much pleasure as the first time.
This novel is actually divided into four 'books' within itself, and while you can read the four books out of order, it really is meant to be read from front to back.
The first book, "The Sword In The Stone", is much like the Disney animated movie that was a More...

2 comments like (14 people liked it)

Jun 30, 2008

Andrew rated it:

It is easy to forget that the fantasy genre does have other giants besides Tolkien. T.H. White is such a person. If you want a literary step up from the popcorn fantasy out there give this book a try.

This book is divided into four books. They all go together but they are also all different in focus and have a growing change in mood. White is using Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur as the outline for his story. He writes in a very anachronistic and witty manner. He also vaguely More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Aug 18, 2011

Megan rated it:

This is an entertaining and accessible novelization about political theory, told through a rather extraordinary re-imagining of the beloved mythological characters of Arthurian legend. I found White's characterizations of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guenevere to be psychologically probing, nuanced, and fascinating, if a little overly tragic. His Merlyn however, was so doddering and wonderful it made me want to cry. If only Merlyn were in more of the book; he was by far my favorite. The Once and Future More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Aug 05, 2011

Angus rated it:

Disclaimer: This is not a review. This may have spoilers. Read at your own risk. Visit original post at Book Rhapsody.

***

Intro

For the life of me, I don’t understand what got into me for even laying eyes on this book aside from one reason that I am not really proud of. I admit that I was officially a huge fan of that notorious local writer Jessica Zafra. Was. I’m putting a stress on that word. In her essays, she always mentioned what a wonderful book this is. She kep More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 05, 2008

Jamie rated it:

I really didn't get what I expected out of this book, which I always thought was a serious retelling of the King Arthur legend. I mean, it is that. Eventually. But it's strangely paced and the work's tone follows this odd arc across its four books that put me off.

The first book, "The Sword in the Stone," follows Arthur's childhood, and it's dippy, whimsical, and laden with fantasy. It is, in fact, not too far from the Disney cartoon adaptation of the same name. Arthur has a More...

1 comment like (9 people liked it)

Jul 16, 2008

Travis rated it:

Just last week I finished one of the greatest books I have ever read. The Once & Future King by T.H. White.

I had never heard of the book until it was mentioned in Bryan Singer's X-Men movies. Xavier talks about it with his students and Magneto can be seen reading it while in his plastic prison. Because all great works of art are connected I had to read the book. I didn't even know it was about King Arthur and his knights until I found it on Amazon.com.

Like most people More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

May 08, 2008

Allison rated it:

i read this when i was a little kid, and have kept rereading it for years. i just love this book. each section is written in prose that suits the time of life of arthur. the sword and the stone is filled with fun and magic and little adventures, perfectly suited to the life of the child. the middle section is a love story with big grand plot twists and that sort of thing, when arthur is a relatively young man. the end, as well as the book of merlyn, is the part of the story that is probabl More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jan 08, 2008

Beth rated it:

I carried a quote from this book around in my purse for decades. In my original version of the book, it is on page 111 and begins, "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or kno More...

3 comments like (8 people liked it)

Feb 17, 2009

Lainie rated it:

This is my favorite novel of all time. It's a great fantasy and the character development is wonderful. I love how the story starts with a young Arthur and is a more childish fun story, but it ages with Arthur himself and becomes more bittersweet.

Best of all is that I have had this book for ages and it has that wonderful smell of having sat on my own bookshelves for ages. This smell is nostalgic of the way books smelled in our house growing up. My mom has always had loads of books h More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 17, 2012

Carol rated it:

I read this book over and over in late childhood and early adolescence. I'm not sure why it spoke to me so much, since I am not a Fantasy Person by any stretch of the imagination, but it did. I found myself thinking about it recently after reading Brave Igraine, a children's book that I felt drew on its tradition. I picked it up with some trepidation, worried that my older self would hate it or find it embarassing or, more likely, boringly sexist. It does have a few of those moments (and a fair More...

6 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 06, 2010

Lavonne rated it:

I felt like I should like this book. It's a classic, after all. However, I guess I'm just not a "classic" kind of girl. There were good parts, even parts that I enjoyed. Unfortunately, it felt like I was wading through large sections of wet concrete to get to them. And lists! Was it really necessary to list all of Sir Ector's dogs by name, not once, but twice? (I wonder if the long lists were a writing style of the 1930's or perhaps they paid by the word during the Depression.) I also More...

4 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 13, 2011

Bryan rated it:

****New review added at bottom November 2, 2011

I love the story of King Arthur and I think T.H. White has remarkable storytelling skills, but the author's viewpoint so strongly irritated me that I could not finish the book.

Throughout the first two and a half books (The Sword and the Stone, The Witch in the Wood, and The Ill-made Knight) I was completely spellbound. Each chapter was better than the one before, the characters were unique and charming, and the story events we More...

6 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 04, 2010

Megan rated it:

I feel a bit inadequate to treat this book as a thoroughly knowledgeable reviewer, and so I know that I will come back and edit my comments as I spend more time in medieval literature and history, especially Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. That said, I wanted to have a record of my inital impressions, however ignorant they may be.
That White's novel is as much a commentary on medieval England and the order of knighthood in those days as a retelling of the Arthurian legend is wholly More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 02, 2008

Erik rated it:

Bored with school books, I asked Dad which of his books he'd recommend. Looking up at his shelves above the desk in a living room nook, he listed Robert Graves' novels, Charles Beard's histories and T. H. White's The Once and Future King. Beard was college reading for him, the kind of book his own father might have recommended. Graves and White were books he had enjoyed during long, boring cruises through the Atlantic and Pacific during WWII.

Although I much enjoyed Graves' novels More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 28, 2008

Octavia rated it:

Pretty good, but somehow it almost completely robbed all the romance from the story. Also, I noticed a lot of things happened differently in this story than I remember happening.

Here are some passages that stood out to me:

"For her, hoever, as for all women, the dreads were in advance of the male horizon. Men often accuse women of driving them to unfaithfulness by senseless jealousy, before there ahs been any thought of unfaithfulness on their part. Yet the thought w More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jul 02, 2008

Werner rated it:

As the above description notes, this collection (it includes The Sword in the Stone, The Witch in the Wood, and The Ill-Made Knight, plus, I believe, some additional material) is "different" in it's approach to the Arthurian legend; but whether it represents "the modern" view of Arthur is dubious --White's view is pretty much unique. (If there is such a thing as a "modern" view of Arthur, it would probably be the historical view that tries to place him the actual h More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 29, 2008

Mark rated it:

I’ve never given King Arthur much thought. He and his Round Table never struck much interest in me. Always seemed like kids’ stories and folklore in the vein of John Henry, Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan.

But this is genuinely a fantastic piece of work. It’s well written, sure, but T.H. White had something to say. Published in 1952, just seven years after World War II, in the midst of American congressmen performing a vehement witch hunt for communists and a Cold War, many people had a l More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 19, 2007

Muneeb rated it:

WOW! Those were murmured out of my mouth as I finished reading T.H White’s The Once and Future King. When I first started to read the story of Arthur I was excepting something like the Disney movie "The Sword in the Stone." As I began to engross myself into the book I was soon corrected.

The Once and Future King consists of four different books making up the story of King Arthur. The first book is probably the best known book because of Disney’s adaptation of it, The Swor More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Sep 22, 2010

Austin rated it:

A rare hybrid book: literature that entertains. It's the only book I've ever read that made me cry without laughing or chopping onions. Some beautiful beautiful writing therein, a vision of life unfolded across epochs and inside of myriad beings and circumstances, an epic where everything changes except for character--and T.H. White's King Arthur is a memorable creation of unique moral decency, which is so unusual in the imaginings of the average tortured, dissipated writer.

4 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 20, 2010

Jeslyn rated it:

This is the second book in the Reading To My Fake Kids series - again, an unforgettable time. Highlights include Merlin training The Wart in falconry, Badger's thesis, King Pellinore and Sir Grummore and their pathetic jousting, Hedgehog singing for his life - "Genevieve, sweet Genevieve..."

Trickier read - lots of words that I had to look up, but this actually made it fun and even more interesting.

It's great to see Fake Son picking up on so many of the themes, r More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Apr 03, 2009

Diana rated it:

This was my favorite book in fifth grade. Have always had a soft spot in my heart for anything Arthurian ever since.

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Sep 28, 2011

Kyleigh added it

I really did not enjoy this book. White writes from the assumption that the reader has read Le Morte D’Arthur, which was absolutely legit for the time he was writing in. For me this was not satisfactory, however. I wanted a re-telling of the story of Camelot. This is not what White does. He re-frames the story and tells certain events. The book is mostly not a story, but a commentary on society. It just got old really fast. I don’t need anywhere close to 600 pages of social commentary.[r More...

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Aug 08, 2011

Halanhoffman added it

Took me a long time to finish. Not a strong plot, but mixes various stories, history and the author's philosophy. Yet it seems like each chapter starts over.

First part is somewhat similar to the Disney movie. The other sections move in many different directions - often away from the three lead characters - focusing on topics like the quests of the other knigts or Pellinore and his questing beast (which often seems like some second-rate Monty Python sketch).

Every so often White writes a poigna More...

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Mar 24, 2009

Kara rated it:

I could easily make the argument that this is my favorite book. My god, this book slapped me across the face when I was in high school. It's as close to perfect as I think a book can be: mannered, clean, heart-rending, and sophisticated. This book woke me up to the fact that I was going to become an adult soon and gave me the lens to begin to look backward and forward in my life. White gets it, he's one of the few who can get down to the details of how it feels to be a human being with honesty a More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 14, 2009

Jane rated it:

I read this book in high school, and I decided to re-read it, because I remember loving it. I had forgotten how difficult it is to get through the first part of the book, and I almost put it down entirely. In The Sword in the Stone, Arthur is a young boy being tutored by Merlyn. Merlyn turns him in to different sorts of animals as part of his "lessons." This is a really essential part of the book, because since each animal has a different societal structure, if you will, Arthur lea More...

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Dec 06, 2008

Jeanne rated it:

I am in the process of culling my book collection. I try to keep only two shelves of book (although that doesn't include childrens books). I bought this one (again) for my husband while he was convalescing from surgery. I figured a flight into the most wonderful fantasy literature would aid the healing process. I cannot bear to send this onto the "half-price" bookshelf. T.H. White is the best teller of the Arthurian legend. You may faintly recognize the initial chapters as the st More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 11, 2012

John rated it:

T. H. White's "The Once and Future King" certainly ranks among the classics of British fantasy literature; a literary masterpiece which is undoubtedly the equal of J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings". It is also one of the genuine classices of 20th Century English literature, and, like "The Lord of the Rings", will be read by countless readers for generations. White's vivid reimagining of the Arthurian legend is based primarily on the medieval tragedy "L More...

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Oct 05, 2011

Grace rated it:

I know this book is often read in high school classes, but not having ever had the opportunity to read it before, I was in for several surprises. First, I was surprised to find that this was the book that Disney based it's 'Sword in the Stone' movie on. Next, I was surprised at the great description in and the research done for this story. T.H. White gives us a lot of details about the era, such as how hay was made and the sport of falconry. He describes tapestries, weapons, and warfare, as More...

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