{"id":1342,"date":"1996-11-05T17:08:49","date_gmt":"1996-11-05T17:08:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1342"},"modified":"2012-04-25T17:09:58","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T17:09:58","slug":"the-lions-of-al-rassan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1342","title":{"rendered":"The Lions of Al-Rassan"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><em>The Lions of             Al-Rassan <\/em><strong>by <\/strong>Guy Gavriel Kay <strong><\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>On November 5, eight of us met at the FACT Office to             discuss Guy Gavriel Kay&#8217;s <strong>The Lions of             Al-Rassan<\/strong>, a fantasy set in a world patterned much             after historical Spain. One of the group&#8217;s regular             members was unable to attend, but she liked the book             enough to e-mail me a set of detailed comments to bring             to the discussion. Opinions differed widely on this             book, as shown by the following comments from early in             the discussion: &#8220;I LOVE this book&#8221;, &#8220;bittersweet but             believable&#8221;, &#8220;Kay&#8217;s done better but this is still an             above average fantasy&#8221;, and &#8220;as a reader, I felt             consistently cheated by Guy Gavriel Kay&#8221;. We all liked             the story and found Kay&#8217;s writing style readable, but             several of us felt that he tried to pull off too much             trickery in his use (or misuse) of point of view. The             book is basically a historical novel full of heroic             deeds, romance, and extremely competent men and women,             with only a couple of minor speculative elements<!--more--> included. The story follows the conventions of             classical tragedy much more than it follows the             traditions of high fantasy. Closing comments on this             book included &#8220;I like his characters&#8221;, &#8220;would be more             interesting if characters had different strengths and             more weaknesses&#8221;, and &#8220;I wonder if the country Karch is             named after the beach volleyball player&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Our next meeting will be a discussion of K. W. Jeter&#8217;s             <strong>Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human<\/strong> at Adventures             in Crime and Space on November 19. Since this book is             supposedly a sequel to both Philip K. Dick&#8217;s <strong>Do             Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/strong> and Ridley             Scott&#8217;s film <strong>Blade Runner<\/strong>, several members of             our group will be viewing the film in preparation for             this discussion. Our meetings are always open to all             comers, so anyone who&#8217;s read the book and wants to             discuss it should feel free to join us.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8212; A. T. Campbell, III<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay On November 5, eight of us met at the FACT Office to discuss Guy Gavriel Kay&#8217;s The Lions of Al-Rassan, a fantasy set in a world patterned much after historical Spain. One of the group&#8217;s regular members was unable to attend, but she liked the book enough [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1342"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1344,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions\/1344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}