30 day book meme: Day 16
Aug. 24th, 2019 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI have banned myself from having any more feelings about The Flight of the Heron until next week due to important RL stuff that I need to actually concentrate on, so this post will have to be about some other books.
16. Can't believe more people haven't read.
For the most part, I understand that my obscure faves are generally obscure for a reason—I may be disappointed that more people haven't read or don't like stuff like The Longest Journey, but I'm not surprised. And then there's the difference between popularity in the world at large, popularity amongst people who read a lot of books and popularity in fannish spaces. So this is a difficult question to answer!
However: all that said, the Raffles stories absolutely deserve to have as much of a cultural presence as the Sherlock Holmes ones, and a bigger fandom! They've got everything you could want: the sort of compelling characters who are very easy indeed to fall in fannish love with, tightly-written and exciting adventure plots that could easily be as iconic in popular culture as Holmes solving mysteries is, ~~~the OTP~~~, a really beautiful writing style and, perhaps most importantly in terms of fandom, a loose canon (as it were) structure that's easy to fill in and extrapolate from with fic and headcanons.
Read these stories!
(Also, Hornung's other books are very good and virtually unheard of beyond a few especially keen Raffles fans, but none of the ones I've read so far have been quite as good or anything like as iconic as the Raffles stories, so that's understandable.)
16. Can't believe more people haven't read.
For the most part, I understand that my obscure faves are generally obscure for a reason—I may be disappointed that more people haven't read or don't like stuff like The Longest Journey, but I'm not surprised. And then there's the difference between popularity in the world at large, popularity amongst people who read a lot of books and popularity in fannish spaces. So this is a difficult question to answer!
However: all that said, the Raffles stories absolutely deserve to have as much of a cultural presence as the Sherlock Holmes ones, and a bigger fandom! They've got everything you could want: the sort of compelling characters who are very easy indeed to fall in fannish love with, tightly-written and exciting adventure plots that could easily be as iconic in popular culture as Holmes solving mysteries is, ~~~the OTP~~~, a really beautiful writing style and, perhaps most importantly in terms of fandom, a loose canon (as it were) structure that's easy to fill in and extrapolate from with fic and headcanons.
Read these stories!
(Also, Hornung's other books are very good and virtually unheard of beyond a few especially keen Raffles fans, but none of the ones I've read so far have been quite as good or anything like as iconic as the Raffles stories, so that's understandable.)
