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30-day meme, day 3
Jan. 29th, 2010 10:05 amDay 04 → Your favorite book
Just like my favourite song is an album, my favourite book is a series. Here's an excerpt from The Waste Lands, which, if I absolutely had to pick, would be my favourite book of the series (no major spoilers so it's safe):
He was the largest creature in the forest which had once been known as the Great West Woods, and he was the oldest. Many of the huge old elms which Roland had noticed in the valley below had been little more than twigs sprouting from the ground when the bear came out of the dim unknown reaches of Out-World like a brutal, wandering king.
Once, the Old People had lived in the West Woods (it was their leavings which Roland had found from time to time during the last weeks), and they had gone in fear of the colossal, undying bear. They had tried to kill him when they first discovered they were not alone in the new territory to which they had come, but although their arrows enraged him, they did no serious damage. And he was not conused about the source of his torment, as were the other beasts of the forest--even the predatory bushcats which denned and littered in the sandhills to the west. No, he knew where the arrows came from, this bear. Knew. And for every arrow which found its mark in the flesh below his shaggy pelt, he took three, four, perhaps as many as half a dozen of the Old People. Children if he could get them; women if he could not. Their warriors he disdained, and this was the final humiliation.
Eventually, as his real nature became clear to them, their efforts to kill him ceased. He was, of course, a demon incarnate--or the shadow of a god. They called him Mir, which to these people meant "the world beneath the world". He stood seventy feet high, and after eighteen or more centuries of undisputed rule in the West Woods, he was dying. Perhaps the instrument of his death had at first been a microscopic organism in something he had eaten or drunk; perhaps it was old age; more likely a combination of both. The cause didn't matter; the ultimate insult--a rapidly multiplying colony of parasites foraging within his fabulous brain--did. After years of calculating, brutal sanity, Mir had run mad.
( full meme list under here )
Just like my favourite song is an album, my favourite book is a series. Here's an excerpt from The Waste Lands, which, if I absolutely had to pick, would be my favourite book of the series (no major spoilers so it's safe):
He was the largest creature in the forest which had once been known as the Great West Woods, and he was the oldest. Many of the huge old elms which Roland had noticed in the valley below had been little more than twigs sprouting from the ground when the bear came out of the dim unknown reaches of Out-World like a brutal, wandering king.
Once, the Old People had lived in the West Woods (it was their leavings which Roland had found from time to time during the last weeks), and they had gone in fear of the colossal, undying bear. They had tried to kill him when they first discovered they were not alone in the new territory to which they had come, but although their arrows enraged him, they did no serious damage. And he was not conused about the source of his torment, as were the other beasts of the forest--even the predatory bushcats which denned and littered in the sandhills to the west. No, he knew where the arrows came from, this bear. Knew. And for every arrow which found its mark in the flesh below his shaggy pelt, he took three, four, perhaps as many as half a dozen of the Old People. Children if he could get them; women if he could not. Their warriors he disdained, and this was the final humiliation.
Eventually, as his real nature became clear to them, their efforts to kill him ceased. He was, of course, a demon incarnate--or the shadow of a god. They called him Mir, which to these people meant "the world beneath the world". He stood seventy feet high, and after eighteen or more centuries of undisputed rule in the West Woods, he was dying. Perhaps the instrument of his death had at first been a microscopic organism in something he had eaten or drunk; perhaps it was old age; more likely a combination of both. The cause didn't matter; the ultimate insult--a rapidly multiplying colony of parasites foraging within his fabulous brain--did. After years of calculating, brutal sanity, Mir had run mad.
( full meme list under here )
