Well, so much for Shannara

I had planned on starting 2016 off by reading The Sword of Shannara, but had to ditch that plan about a week ago because the book is starting to fall apart; the perils of paperback library books. Seeing as how several of the pages decided to divorce themselves from the binding, I just have to wait until I can get my own copy before I can resume following the adventures of Shea and Flick. So what am I reading now?

I bought this something like ten years ago and never read it until now, aside from one abortive attempt when I first bought it, but that was like five years before I finally became a fantasy addict.

Young Tristran Thorn will do anything to win the cold heart of beautiful Victoria—even fetch her the star they watch fall from the night sky. But to do so, he must enter the unexplored lands on the other side of the ancient wall that gives their tiny village its name. Beyond that old stone wall, Tristran learns, lies Faerie—where nothing, not even a fallen star, is what he imagined.

If the premise of the book sounds familiar, it was turned into a movie back in 2007 starring Claire Danes, Robert De Niro, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Good movie.

It's pretty excellent so far. Gaiman wrote Stardust in the vein of pre-Tolkien fantasy, like Lord Dunsany's "King of Elfland's Daughter" and such, so there's no like epic, high, or grimdark elements which is actually a nice change of pace after what I read last year

One of the reasons I picked Stardust besides having it for ten years, is because it clocks in at only 248 pages. I have at least fourteen more books to read before year's end, so starting off with a fairly short book that I can finish quickly will hopefully help motivate me to keep going. After I finish Stardust, I'm going read Lev Grossman's The Magicians. After that, maybe a break from fantasy to read either scifi or just plain fiction. My overall strategy is to focus on books that are less than 500 pages (preferably in the high 300 to low 400 range) in order to clear them out of the way before tackling the door stoppers. The latter's going to be a bitch for sure because I have both Jordan and Sanderson AND Martin in the pile. Yeah.