The Sharing Knife: Legacy. My plan had been to do a quick character re-read on a selection of epic fantasy that I own, and talk about constructions of beauty in various male and female characters, and how physical descriptions of each relate to their actual characterization and character arc. Then I got caught up.
Legacy is actually the second book in a two-part series by Lois McMaster Bujold, and I, forgetting how engrossing it had been the first time I read it, got completely swept away by Beguilment, the first book, and am now reading the second over again. Hopefully (maybe?), this won’t happen with every book I plan to read for this “beauty essay,” as I’ve titled it in my Scriv file, as many, if not all, of the books I plan to use are parts of series. Well, ok, I probably won’t be tempted to read all of GRRM again. But some others I have planned include Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars series book 1: King’s Dragon, Brandon Sanderson’s standalone, Elantris, Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth book 1: Wizard’s First Rule, and Gail Z. Martin’s The Summoner (part of the Necromancer series, among others.
Yes, some of the books are by male authors, but I’d like to do a bit of a gender comparison, as well as simply pointing out tropes and ways that authors have used beauty in the past as part of narrative. Maybe this could even be the start of a larger project in which people who have read other epic fantasy by a variety of authors can help to compile more statistics as a way of further examining this genre that we all love.
Anyway, back to my reading and, eventual, writing.
Edge Cases 