Complicated Company: Resolution 2019

So this year’s resolution has some background to it.

Way back when, a friend and I had two significant things in common—disposable income and a competitive drive to read all the things. We were constantly buying books and racing through them before shoving them at each other, or taunting each other with “This is soooo good and you have to wait for me to finish it!”

We actually argued quite a lot about the matter; we stole each other’s books, sometimes right out from under each other. There was a weekend trip to Busch Gardens, where we spent most of the weekend trying to get ahead on our reading.

We zoomed through whole swathes of books, consuming like locusts. We read horror—vampires and witches and trashy trashy 80s peak craziness. We read fantasy; we read science fiction; and oh god, we read dragons. All the dragons. We became friends over a book called Dragonworld by Byron Preiss, and cemented the friendship over McCaffrey’s Dragonflight.

We read David Eddings and Piers Anthony and Brian Daley and Julian May and Keith Laumer and Alan Dean Foster and Tolkien and Anne McCaffrey and Simon Hawke. Gordon Dickson and Phyllis Eisenstein and Lovecraft and Mike Resnick. We read Jack L Chalker and Victor Milan & Robert Vardeman.

Our  tastes did diverge. She adored Steven R Donaldson’s Fool’s Bane, which I couldn’t get through. I was smitten by the Dorsai books which left her cold. She preferred epic fantasy, the more epic the better, and I had a weakness for mystery slipping into my fantasy. (Yes, I was just waiting for the urban fantasy boom, even if I didn’t know it.)

This list of books is not even remotely comprehensive, but it’s there just to show that we were frankly, pretty indiscriminate. An interesting cover, a few fantasy buzzwords, and we would probably go for it, whole hog.

Books were either “good” or “great!” or “this one was weird”. “Bad” as a judgment only showed up if the book was actually poorly written on a grammatical level. It never really occurred to us, I think, that book plots could be “bad”, or that some storylines could be problematic.

We were consuming and storing information, but we sure as hell weren’t analyzing it.

And one day, she said, “Look at this book. I liked his other books. This one is weird.” (paraphrased)

The author? Glen Cook. His other books: the Garret PI series. The “weird” book: The Black Company

And here we come to my resolution.

We both read The Black Company and it fell into that indefinable category for us— “weird, but…” But what, was the question. We kept reading until we caught up on the series, and then, individually, later, I continued collecting his books, though they went straight to my TBR list and stayed there.

I don’t believe in books being “wrong” for kids to read, but some books need more context than the readers have. That was exactly the case with The Black Company. It wasn’t like Tolkien’s forces of good fighting evil, making fancy speeches and being all chosen ones. It wasn’t about glamorous dragonriders defending their world. It wasn’t even quite like Barbara Hambly’s mercenaries, though at least that gave us some clues.

I was a sheltered teen from a family that never talked about their military service—which was more scientific than on-the-ground, anyway—and I didn’t follow the news. I didn’t even take history at my prep school until senior year. I didn’t understand morally grey. Not really. I didn’t understand exigencies of war. I didn’t understand anything about the situation these characters were in, yet there was something riveting about them.

I read the first five of the books and I have retained almost nothing. No context=poor reading comprehension=very little retention. I remember Croaker. I remember the camaraderie and the exhaustion and the slog of battle, the efforts it took just to keep an army moving. I remember twisty, different sorts of magic than I expected. And I know now that their blend of reality and fantasy was among the first subgenre of fantasy that would become “gritty” then “grimdark”.

I’ve kept these books for years and years and years, always with the “god, I need to reread those someday!” thought.

Now, with a potential TV show in the works and an annual resolution to strive for, 2019 seems like the right time.

So my 2019 Resolution is to reread the first five books of The Black Company series and to finally read the rest, including the collected short stories and the rumored new release.

I can’t wait to see what my adult self makes of them.